I’d like to have a regex to match a word, even if there are spaces between the characters.
When I want to match the word test, it should match the following:
test
t est
t e s t
And so on, but it should not match things like this:
tste
te ts
s tet
I have this regex:
(t[s]*e[s]*s[s]*t[s]*)
But I don’t believe that this one is very efficient.
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Answer
This is the only way to match such words. You have to consume these spaces, otherwise you won’t have a match. Actually, your pattern is the same as
ts*es*ss*t
If the word appears inside a larger string, you can consider a word boundary version:
bts*es*ss*tb
NOTE: If only one whitespace is allowed in between each letter, you can use ? quantifier instead of *:
ts?es?ss?t