🔍Regex Recipes

Find Trailing Spaces

Detect trailing whitespace at end of lines for code cleanup.

Pattern

+$

Explanation

Matches one or more spaces at the end of lines. Useful for code quality and linting.

Examples

Has trailing

Input

code

Output

✓ Match (3 trailing spaces)

Clean line

Input

code

Output

✗ No match

Tab trailing

Input

code

Output

✗ No match (space pattern only)

Code Examples

JavaScript

// Find lines with trailing spaces
const code = `
function hello() {  
  return 'world';   
}
`;

// Check for trailing spaces
const hasTrailing = / +$/m.test(code);

// Remove trailing spaces
const cleaned = code.replace(/ +$/gm, '');

// Or all trailing whitespace (spaces, tabs)
const cleanedAll = code.replace(/\s+$/gm, '');

Try it Now

Open in Regex Tester Open in Find & Replace

💡 Tips

Configure your editor to remove trailing spaces on save
Add to pre-commit hooks
Use \s+$ to include tabs
Many linters flag this automatically

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Pattern only matches spaces, not tabs
Use \s+ to match all whitespace types
IDE settings can auto-remove trailing spaces
May be caught by linters (ESLint, etc.)