How can I create a regular expression that requires 4 characters and no spaces?

Question

I am trying to make the user input exactly 4 characters with no spaces... here's what I have:

.[^\s]{4}

but everything I enter says that it didn't match the regex...

Where am I going wrong?

Solution 1

Why is there an extra . in front? That will match a separate character before your "four non-spaces" get counted.

You probably also want to bind it to the beginning and end of the string, so:

^[^\s]{4}$

Solution 2

Your making it more complicated than it needs to be and using \S, not \s so you don't match spaces. I think this should work for you:

^[\S]{4}$

Definition of solution:

^ - begins with

[/S] - capital 'S' means no white space

{4} - match 4 times

$ - end of string

Solution 3

\S{4}

will match 4 non-whitespace characters. If you are using c# regex, I highly recommend Expresso.

Solution 4

In Java:

[^\s]{4,4}

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