Exclude last occurrence on line from Regex match

Question

I would like to select all whitespaces except the last occurrence on each line so that I can replace the whitespaces with a single delimiter for import purposes.

The matches are all groups of whitespaces. There are CRLF at the end of each line. I tried with and without $, \\r\\n etc.. I feel like I am missing soemthing very obvious but wasnt able to pin it down with google so far.

I tried negative lookahead already. Unfortunately in Notepad++ the CRLF is included in the match, so that when I try to replace the data it strips away the new line.

Answer 1

If I understand well what you are trying to do,

with regexpal (check the m modifier box):

(?=([^\r\n\S]+))\1(?!$)

where (?=(...))\\1 is a trick to emulate an atomic group with javascript and [^\\r\\n\\S] is like \\s but without \\r and \\n

with notepad++:

\h++(?!$)

where \\h stands for any horizontal whitespace (this class is not available in javascript too) and ++ is a possessive quantifier . Note that by default $ means the end of the line in notepad++.