Java regular expression to match _all_ whitespace characters
java, regex
Solution
The ` ` is only whitespace in HTML. Use an HTML parser to extract the plain text. and `\s` should work just fine.
Problem
I'm looking for a regular expression in Java which matches all whitespace characters in a String. "\s" matches only some, it does not match ` ` and similar non-ascii whitespaces. I'm looking for a regular expression which matches all (common) white-space characters which can occur in a Java String. [Edit] To clarify: I do not mean the string sequence "` `" I mean the sincle unicode character U+00A0 that is often represented by "` `", e.g. in HTML, and all other unicode characters with a similar white-space meainig, e.g. "NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+202F), Word joiner encoded in Unicode 3.2 and above as U+2060, "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE" (U+FEFF) and any other character that can be regareded as white-space. [Answer] For my pupose, ie catching all whitespace characters, unicode + traditional, the following expression does the job: `[\p{Z}\s]` The answer is in the comments below but since it is a bit hidden I repeat it here.