[regex] How to search for occurrences of more than one space between words in a line

How to search for occurrences of more than one space between words in a line

1. this is a line containing  2 spaces
2. this is a line containing   3 spaces
3. this is a line containing multiple spaces first  second   three   four

All the above are valid matches for this regex. What regex should I use?

This question is related to regex eclipse replace

The answer is


Search for [ ]{2,}. This will find two or more adjacent spaces anywhere within the line. It will also match leading and trailing spaces as well as lines that consist entirely of spaces. If you don't want that, check out Alexander's answer.

Actually, you can leave out the brackets, they are just for clarity (otherwise the space character that is being repeated isn't that well visible :)).

The problem with \s{2,} is that it will also match newlines on Windows files (where newlines are denoted by CRLF or \r\n which is matched by \s{2}.

If you also want to find multiple tabs and spaces, use [ \t]{2,}.


Simple solution:

/\s{2,}/

This matches all occurrences of one or more whitespace characters. If you need to match the entire line, but only if it contains two or more consecutive whitespace characters:

/^.*\s{2,}.*$/

If the whitespaces don't need to be consecutive:

/^(.*\s.*){2,}$/

This regex selects all spaces, you can use this and replace it with a single space

\s+

example in python

result = re.sub('\s+',' ', data))

Here is my solution

[^0-9A-Z,\n]

This will remove all the digits, commas and new lines but select the middle space such as data set of

  • 20171106,16632 ESCG0000018SB
  • 20171107,280 ESCG0000018SB
  • 20171106,70476 ESCG0000018SB

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