Regular expression to allow trailing and leading spaces

Question

I now validate email addresses like so:

[-+.'\w]+@[-.\w]+\.[-.\w]+

Which means that if users accidentally have a trailing or leading space in that address (e.g. when copy/pasting), the expression validates to false.

So I want to allow trailing and leading spaces on the above expression. How can I do so?

Answer 1

Use \s* at the end and start of your regex. \s* means white spaces having zero or more occurrence.