remove unwanted space in between a string

Question

I wanna know how to remove unwanted space in between a string. For example:

>>> a = "Hello    world"

and i want to print it removing the extra middle spaces.

Hello world

@Tim: And if you indent your code by 4 spaces, you save us the work of removing all the `
`-tags used by people who don't bother to look up the SO formatting options. — Björn Pollex, May 26 '11 at 17:56
Ah, of course, I forgot. (I'm very much a SO newbie, in terms of actually posting!) — marnir, May 27 '11 at 14:26

score 47 · Answer 1 · answered May 26 '11 at 17:52

47

This will work:

" ".join(a.split())

Without any arguments, a.split() will automatically split on whitespace and discard duplicates, the " ".join() joins the resulting list into one string.

answered May 26 '11 at 17:52

Ed L

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For me it worked with ```"".join(a.split())``` i.e. without giving space in quotation before ```.join()``` – Neerali Acharya Apr 09 '19 at 05:58
1

@NiraliAcharya that removes all the spaces, but the asker wanted to remove the extra spaces. – Ed L Apr 09 '19 at 23:31

score 22 · Answer 2 · answered May 26 '11 at 17:57

22

Regular expressions also work

>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', 'Hello     World')
'Hello World'

answered May 26 '11 at 17:57

Matty K

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This worked best for me to remove trailing, leading and middle white space, and remove \n newline characters. – Ryan B Apr 03 '20 at 05:22
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This is a good way to go if you are using Pandas, specifically `df['full_name'] = df['full_name'].replace('\s+', ' ', regex=True)` – ProfessorPorcupine Jun 28 '22 at 19:35

remove unwanted space in between a string

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