Splitting a string at all whitespace

Question

I need to split a string at all whitespace, it should ONLY contain the words themselves.

How can I do this in vb.net?

Tabs, Newlines, etc. must all be split!

This has been bugging me for quite a while now, as my syntax highlighter I made completely ignores the first word in each line except for the very first line.

Answer 1

Try this:

Regex.Split("your string here", "\s+")

Answer 2

Dim words As String = "This is a list of words, with: a bit of punctuation" + _
                          vbTab + "and a tab character." + vbNewLine
Dim split As String() = words.Split(New [Char]() {" "c, CChar(vbTab), CChar(vbNewLine) })

Answer 3

String.Split() (no parameters) does split on all whitespace (including LF/CR)

Answer 4

String.Split() will split on every single whitespace, so the result will contain empty strings usually. The Regex solution Ruben Farias has given is the correct way to do it. I have upvoted his answer but I want to give a small addition, dissecting the regex:

\s is a character class that matches all whitespace characters.

In order to split the string correctly when it contains multiple whitespace characters between words, we need to add a quantifier (or repetition operator) to the specification to match all whitespace between words. The correct quantifier to use in this case is +, meaning "one or more" occurrences of a given specification. While the syntax "\s+" is sufficient here, I prefer the more explicit "[\s]+".