Question

I am trying to match all words with single or multiple spaces. my expression

(\w+\s*)* is not working

edit 1:
Let say i have a sentence in this form

[[do "hi i am bob"]]
[[do "hi   i am Bob"]]

now I have to replace this with 
cool("hi i am bob") or 
cool("hi    i am Bob")

I do not care about replacing multiple spaces with single .

I can achieve this for a single word like

\[\[do\"(\w+)\"\]\] and replacing regex cool\(\"$1\") but this does not look like an effective solution and does not match multiple words ….
I apologies for incomplete question

any help will be aprecciated

Answer 1

Find this Regular Expression:

/\[\[do\s+("[\w\s]+")\s*\]\]/

And do the following replacement:

'cool($1)'

The only special thing that’s being done here is using character classes to our advantage with

[\w\s]+

Matches one or more word or space characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, and whitespace). That’;; eat up your internal stuff no problem.

'[[do "hi   i am Bob"]]'.replace(/\[\[do\s+("[\w\s]+")\s*\]\]/, 'cool($1)')

Spits out

cool("hi   i am Bob")

Though – if you want to add punctuation (which you probably will), you should do it like this:

/\[\[do\s+("[^"]+")\s*\]\]/

Which will match any character that’s not a double quote, preserving your substring. There are more complicated ones to allow you to deal with escaped quotation marks, but I think that’s outside the scope of this question.