Thread: Trying to find the first space " " character...

Could someone give me a hand building a regex to find only the first space (" ") character of a line?

For example:

Code:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
   ^ Find only this space.

Thanks for the reply, Wolffy, but that string replaces the entire line in PHP and doesn't work at all in Programmer's Notepad2.

So far I've got:

Code:

(^[\w]+)[ ](?=.)

which matches everything up to and including the first space. I tried setting a lookbehind argument like:

Code:

(?<=(^[\w]+))[ ](?=.)

but the regex engine doesn't like lookbehind without a fixed length. This includes {n,m} arguments in lieu of the +.

What I have is a huge list of names that looks similar to this:

Code:

Clinton Bill
Carter Jimmy
Bush G H W
Bush George W

As you can see, it's last name, first name/inital and sometimes middle initial, all separated by a space. What I need to do is find only the first space character and replace it with a tab so I can import this list into a database. The end result would be:

Code:

Clinton\tBill
Carter\tJimmy
Bush\tG H W
Bush\tGeorge W

What editor are you using? Using your code in PHP replaces the whole line and Programmer's Notepad doesn't like () in its regex find/replace...

Not exactly the solution I was hoping for, but whatever works, right?

Thanks for the assist.