How do I remove trailing whitespace using a regular expression?

Question

I want to remove trailing white spaces and tabs from my code without removing empty lines.

I tried:

\\s+$

and:

([^\\n]         


        

Answer 1

If using Visual Studio 2012 and later (which uses .NET regular expressions), you can remove trailing whitespace without removing blank lines by using the following regex

Replace (?([^\r\n])\s)+(\r?\n)

With $1

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Some explanation

The reason you need the rather complicated expression is that the character class \s matches spaces, tabs and newline characters, so \s+ will match a group of lines containing only whitespace. It doesn't help adding a $ termination to this regex, because this will still match a group of lines containing only whitespace and newline characters.

You may also want to know (as I did) exactly what the (?([^\r\n])\s) expression means. This is an Alternation Construct, which effectively means match to the whitespace character class if it is not a carriage return or linefeed.

Alternation constructs normally have a true and false part,

(?( expression ) yes | no )

but in this case the false part is not specified.

Answer 2

You can simply use it like this:

var regex = /( )/g;

Sample: click here

Answer 3

The platform is not specified, but in C# (.NET) it would be:

Regular expression (presumes the multiline option - the example below uses it):

    [ \t]+(\r?$)

Replacement:

    $1

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For an explanation of "\r?$", see Regular Expression Options, Multiline Mode (MSDN).

Code example

This will remove all trailing spaces and all trailing TABs in all lines:

string inputText = "     Hello, World!  \r\n" +
                   "  Some other line\r\n" +
                   "     The last line  ";
string cleanedUpText = Regex.Replace(inputText,
                                     @"[ \t]+(\r?$)", @"$1",
                                     RegexOptions.Multiline);

Answer 4

To remove trailing whitespace while also preserving whitespace-only lines, you want the regex to only remove trailing whitespace after non-whitespace characters. So you need to first check for a non-whitespace character. This means that the non-whitespace character will be included in the match, so you need to include it in the replacement.

Regex: ([^ \t\r\n])[ \t]+$

Replacement: \1 or $1, depending on the IDE

Answer 5

[ |\t]+$ with an empty replace works. \s+($) with a $1 replace also works. At least in Visual Studio Code...

Answer 6

To remove any blank trailing spaces use this:

\n|^\s+\n

I tested in the Atom and Xcode editors.