Question

I am trying to match string which,

1. should contain at least one character which is not a space

2. the string should be 1 to 8 characters in length,

I wonder why the below code is not working when i want to restrict to 1 to 8 characters.

.*\S.{1,8}

should match,

abcdefge

 abcdefg   - first character is space, Any number of spaces can be there, but atleaset one non space character should be there

       a  

Should not match,

            - All spaces
 abcdefghijklm - Exeeds more then 8 characters

Thanks

Answer 1

use a look-ahead for your first criteria, and a quantified ‘anything’ character combined with start and end anchors for the second:

/^(?=.*\S).{1,8}$/

(this isn’t tested so my apologies for the bugs)