regex to remove new line and spaces

Question

I created a regex to get rid of spaces, tabs, new lines, etc.

(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+

My issue is that it matches some spaces and some new lines, not all of them. Why is that?

I have tried:

(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t+]*[\r\n]+

but still doesn't seem to match multiple spaces

Regex tester demo

Answer 1

I'm not quite sure what you want to achieve here. But if you, as you state in the question, just ** all you have to do is replace \s with nothing. See regex101. (replacing with * for clarity)

The problem with your regex is (besides from it being overly complex ;) that the ending [\r\n]+ requires a CR/LF and, if the line isn't preceded by an empty line (^[\r\n] matches a line beginning with a linefeed - i.e. an empty line), the [\r\n]+ in the first also requires a CR/LF.

In short - it will never match two consecutive non empty lines.

Regards.