Regex: Exact match ignoring leading and trailing whitespaces

July 5, 2022

for selecting amongst couple of others, I need to match an exact string which is surrounded by leading and trailing whitespaces and linebreaks in RegEx and I cannot get it to work, it drives me crazy.

Example text (the dots are whitespaces):

..
............SCV
..........

I need to check if this text is equal ‘CV’ (and it should NOT match ‘SCV’)

I tried to figure out using non-capturing groups (?:\s*) like here: https://regex101.com/r/n3L0Vu/1

but either it matches whitespaces too, or it also matches SCV when I just want it to match CV.

Thank you very much for help, I very appreciate it.

Edit: Oh, in above example I justed used one word, but it should also work for sentences containing whitespaces between the words like "This is my CV"

>Solution :

Try with the following regex:

^\W*(<your_matching_string>)\W*$

It will enclose your match between

^\W*: start of string and any character other than alphanumeric ones (optional)
\W*$: any character other than alphanumeric ones (optional) and end of string

Note: You can remove the parentheses, here are just used for clarity reasons.