Continued Regular Expressions(4)

Match Whitespace

• The challenges so far have covered matching letters of the alphabet and numbers. You can also match the whitespace or spaces between letters.
• You can search for whitespace using \s, which is a lowercase s. This pattern not only matches whitespace, but also carriage return, tab, form feed, and new line characters. You can think of it as similar to the character class [ \r\t\f\n\v].
• Ex:

let sample = "Whitespace is important in separating words";
let countWhiteSpace = /\s/; 
let result = sample.match(countWhiteSpace);

console.log(result); will display [ ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ', ' ' ]

Match Non-Whitespace Characters

• You learned about searching for whitespace using \s, with a lowercase s. You can also search for everything except whitespace. Search for non-whitespace using \S, which is an uppercase s. This pattern will not match whitespace, carriage return, tab, form feed, and new line characters.
• Ex:

let sample = "Whitespace is important in separating words";
let countNonWhiteSpace = /\S/g; // 
let result = sample.match(countNonWhiteSpace);

console.log(result); will display
[ 'W',
  'h',
  'i',
  't',
  'e',
  's',
  'p',
  'a',
  'c',
  'e',
  'i',
  's',
  'i',
  'm',
  'p',
  'o',
  'r',
  't',
  'a',
  'n',
  't',
  'i',
  'n',
  's',
  'e',
  'p',
  'a',
  'r',
  'a',
  't',
  'i',
  'n',
  'g',
  'w',
  'o',
  'r',
  'd',
  's' ]

Specify Upper and Lower Number of Matches

• Recall that you use the plus sign + to look for one or more characters and the asterisk * to look for zero or more characters. These are convenient but sometimes you want to match a certain range of patterns.
• You can specify the lower and upper number of patterns with quantity specifiers. Quantity specifiers are used with curly brackets ({ and }). You put two numbers between the curly brackets - for the lower and upper number of patterns.
• For example, here we changed the regex ohRegex to match the entire phrase Oh no only when it has 3 to 6 letter h's.

let ohStr = "Ohhh no";
let ohRegex = /Oh{3,6}\sno/;
let result = ohRegex.test(ohStr);
console.log(result); will display true

Specify Only the Lower Number of Matches

• To only specify the lower number of patterns, keep the first number followed by a comma.
• For example, here we changed the regex haRegex to match the word Hazzah only when it has four or more letter z's.

let haStr = "Hazzzzzah";
let haRegex = /Haz{4,}ah/;
let result = haRegex.test(haStr)

console.log(result); will display true

Specify Exact Number of Matches

• To specify a certain number of patterns, just have that one number between the curly brackets.
• For example, here we changed the regex timRegex to match the word Timber only when it has four letter m's.

let timStr = "Timmmmber";
let timRegex = /Tim{4}ber/; 
let result = timRegex.test(timStr);

console.log(result); will display true