regular expression for anything but an empty string in c#

Question

Hi,

Is it possible to use a regular expression to detect anything that is NOT an "empty string" like this:

string s1 = "";
string s2 = " ";
string s3 = "  ";
string s4 = "   ";

etc.

I know I could use trim etc. but I would like to use a regular expression.

Thanks.

Christian

Answer 1

^(?!\s*$).+

will match any string that contains at least one non-space character.

So

if (Regex.IsMatch(subjectString, @"^(?!\s*$).+")) {
    // Successful match
} else {
    // Match attempt failed
}

should do this for you.

^ anchors the search at the start of the string.

(?!\s*$), a so-called positive lookahead, asserts that it's impossible to match only whitespace characters until the end of the string.

.+ will then actually do the match. It will match anything (except newline) up to the end of the string. If you want to allow newlines, you'll have to set the RegexOptions.Singleline option.

---

Left over from the previous version of your question:

^\s*$

matches strings that contain only whitespace (or are empty).

The exact opposite:

^\S+$

matches only strings that consist of only non-whitespace characters, one character minimum.

Answer 2

I think [ ]{4} might work in the example where you need to detect 4 spaces. Same with the rest: [ ]{1}, [ ]{2} and [ ]{3}. If you want to detect an empty string in general, ^[ ]*$ will do.

Answer 3

In .Net 4.0, you can also call String.IsNullOrWhitespace.

Answer 4

You could also use:

public static bool IsWhiteSpace(string s) 
{
    return s.Trim().Length == 0;
}

Answer 5

You can do one of two things:

• match against ^\s*$; a match means the string is "empty"
  • ^, $ are the beginning and end of string anchors respectively
  • \s is a whitespace character
  • * is zero-or-more repetition of
• find a \S; an occurrence means the string is NOT "empty"
  • \S is the negated version of \s (note the case difference)
  • \S therefore matches any non-whitespace character

References

• regular-expressions.info, Anchors, Repetition
• MSDN - Character classes - Whitespace character \s
  • Note that unless you're using RegexOptions.ECMAScript, \s matches things like ellipsis …

Related questions

• .Net regex: what is the word character \w?

Answer 6

Assertions are not necessary for this. \S should work by itself as it matches any non-whitespace.