They both seem to work but I have been told you should use both when you're forming a RegExp?
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1i think this is a general regex question. maybe take out javascript,html tags and change the title. – ddavison Jul 30 '13 at 15:18
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\s denotes whitespace and where as \t denotes tab – Shushant Jul 30 '13 at 15:26
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1Just a pedantic adjustment to what most answers are saying here: `[\s\t]` is redundant. The `\t` is already part of `\s` so you don't have to include the `\t`. In the case of `\s\t`, the `\t` is not redundant. It is looking for a whitespace, followed by a tab. So be careful if you're dealing with a character class or not. – Shaz Jul 30 '13 at 15:41
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\s matches any whitespace character, including tabs. \t only matches a tab character.
\t being a subset of \s, you should not have to use both at the same time.
Frédéric Hamidi
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1This answer has been added to the [Stack Overflow Regular Expression FAQ](http://stackoverflow.com/a/22944075/2736496), under "Escape Sequences". – aliteralmind Apr 10 '14 at 01:02
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\s matches a single whitespace character, which includes spaces, tabs, form feeds, line feeds and other unicode spaces.
\t Matches a single tab.
If you are using \s, you don't need to include \t.
More information on regex patterns here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp
talemyn
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\t is a literal tab whereas \s is a predefined character class. \s matches any whitespace character while \t matches only tabs (which are also matched by \s).
This is similar to asking what the difference between \d and 0 is. 0 is a literal 0 whereas \d is any digit.
arshajii
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\s contains all whitespace characters. For example, in Java, \s is [\t\n\x0b\r\f]. \t is just a single tab, so you don't need to use both.
Song Gao
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