Python regular expression to replace blocks of whitespace with single character

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to replace blocks of white space with a single character. I have a possibly poorly formatted file and I would like to unify the delimiter for the data. For instance:

3,4  5\t6 \t 7            8 9

would then become:

3,4,5,6,7,8,9

Something similar to this question but for python.

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

5

>>string = '4  5\t6 \t 7            8 9'
>>','.join(string.split())
>>'4,5,6,7,8,9'

see: Compress whitespaces in string

edited May 23 '17 at 10:26

Community

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answered Aug 12 '15 at 03:11

NJM

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Thanks this is also a great answer. Very simple and pythonic. – nalyd88 Aug 14 '15 at 01:28

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 12 '15 at 04:26

5

If you want regex:

    import re
    import sys
    line = sys.argv[1]
    re.sub(r'\s+', ',',line)

edited Aug 12 '15 at 04:26

AmirC

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answered Aug 12 '15 at 03:16

Thane Plummer

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 12 '15 at 05:30

0

what about this

          string = "4  5\t6 \t 7            8 9"#your string
          a = string.split()
          print ', '.join(a)   #convert a list to string

answered Aug 12 '15 at 05:30

Denis

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Python regular expression to replace blocks of whitespace with single character

3 Answers3