regex to match a single character that is anything but a space

Question

I need to match a single character that is anything but a space but I don't know how to do that with regex.

Answer 1

The following should suffice:

[^ ]

If you want to expand that to anything but white-space (line breaks, tabs, spaces, hard spaces):

[^\s]

or

\S  # Note this is a CAPITAL 'S'!

Answer 2

• \s matches any white-space character
• \S matches any non-white-space character
• You can match a space character with just the space character;
• [^ ] matches anything but a space character.

Pick whichever is most appropriate.

Answer 3

I use either [^[:space:]] or [^ ] depending on the situation.