Index and whitespace

I think I know the answer already but is there a way to use 'index' to find the first occurrence of white space? TIA.

Check out the info here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-instead-of-one
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...erl/87504#87504

Thanks. I kind of figured the answer was no.

Index only works for specific substrings, so if you were looking for a particular whitespace character, it would work. If you're searching for any whitespace, a regexp will be the way to go.

Thanks, except I don't know of a way to use regex with index.

You can't.

Use either index (if you just need to find the specific space character (ASCII 32), i.e. the white space as typed by the space bar on a computer), and use a regex if you need to match the more general idea of white space (the \s metacharacter), i.e. either such a space or a tab, etc.

The problem is I need to know at what character position the first white space of any kind occurs. I'm thinking I need write a function to 'split' using a regexp for white space then return the length of the first string.

From the links that spacebar208 posted, you will see that the $-[0] variable will hold the offset of the beginning of the last successful regexp match. So you can achieve what you want with: