JavaScript \s or \S Metacharacters | RegEx for WhiteSpace

This post is published to provide information about two metacharacters used in JavaScript regular expression. That are:

The \s Metacharacter
The \S Metacharacter

The \s Metacharacter

The \s metacharacter is used when we need to match any whitespaces available in the specified text using regular expression. For example:

HTML with JavaScript Code

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

   <p id="xyz"></p>

   <script>
      let myString = "I got 100% marks in Cyber Security!";
      let pattern = /\s/g;
      document.getElementById("xyz").innerHTML = myString.match(pattern);
   </script>
   
</body>
</html>

Output

There are five commas, indicating to six whitespaces. One before the first comma and one after the last comma. Whereas other whitespaces are in-between the commas.

Note - A space, tab, vertical tab, new line, carriage return, and form feed are all comes in the category of whitespaces here.

Note: The match() method is used to match a string with/using a regular expression.

The \S Metacharacter

Unlike \s, the \S metacharacter is used when we need to match with all characters other than whitespace characters. For example:

HTML with JavaScript Code

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

   <p id="xyz"></p>

   <script>
      let myString = "I got 100% marks in Cyber Security!";
      let pattern = /\S/g;
      document.getElementById("xyz").innerHTML = myString.match(pattern);
   </script>
   
</body>
</html>

Output

JavaScript Online Test

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