Remove extra spaces from entire sentence

Question

I have below variable

sen <- "I have a    sentence  "

I just want to remove spaces from above sentence (all of spaces, beginning end & middle), I know how to use str_trim(sen), but that only removes beginning & end spaces.I want to get rid of middle as well

Required Output "I have a sentence"

Thank you this helps, but does this remove only extra spaces & not all spaces ? — , Sep 13 '19 at 09:26
No, this removes all spaces, since in your question you stated `all of spaces`. — user2974951, Sep 13 '19 at 09:27
I am sorry I mean remove all extra spaces, sorry for confusion — , Sep 13 '19 at 09:27

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 13 '19 at 09:23

You are in luck because there is exact same function in stringr package str_squish()

this should do what you want to achieve

library(stringr)
sen <- "I have a    sentence  "
str_squish(sen)
print(sen)

Output: "I have a sentence"

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '19 at 09:28

3

We could use gsub to replace more than one space with one space. We wrap it in trimws to remove spaces present at the start and end of the string.

trimws(gsub("\\s+", " ", sen))
#[1] "I have a sentence"

answered Sep 13 '19 at 09:28

Ronak Shah

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Thank you, I am not very strong in regular expression, any helpful guide for that – Sep 13 '19 at 09:31
1

@Artika https://www.regular-expressions.info/ seems to be a good resource. – Ronak Shah Sep 13 '19 at 09:33

Remove extra spaces from entire sentence

2 Answers2