removing random whitespace

Question

All,

I have some indexed text that I would like to format in a more uniform manor. For example:

I    live in  Virginia   and it is  raining     today

I would like that to print out as

I live in Virginia and it is raining today

I am writing my application in Python so if anyone knows how to do this sort of string manipulation, it would be greatly appreciated.

Adam

Regexes to trim spaces between words to just 1 in this: possible duplicate of [Trim whitespace from middle of string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216870/trim-whitespace-from-middle-of-string). If you don't know Python's `re` module, this is an answer that shows it's use: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216870/trim-whitespace-from-middle-of-string/1250923#1250923 — wkl, Sep 07 '11 at 17:45
`re.sub(r'[ \t]{2,}', ' ', str)`. Be careful when using `\s` instead, since that includes new lines and carriage returns. — NullUserException, Sep 07 '11 at 17:47

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 07 '11 at 17:49

9

A very simple approach:

s = "I    live in  Virginia   and it is  raining     today"
words = s.split()
print ' '.join(words)

answered Sep 07 '11 at 17:49

Jochen Ritzel

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 07 '11 at 17:49

3

You could use a regular expression to accomplish this

import re
s = 'I    live in  Virginia   and it is  raining     today'
print re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', s)

answered Sep 07 '11 at 17:49

ScArcher2

As NullUserException pointed out - r'[ \t]{2,}' would be used to replace spaces or tabs. I just did a general whitespace replace in my answer. – ScArcher2 Sep 07 '11 at 17:54

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 19 '11 at 18:22

0

Regular expressions do work here, but are probably overkill. One line without any imports would take care of it:

sentence = 'I    live in  Virginia   and it is  raining     today'
' '.join([segment for segment in sentence.split()])

edited Sep 19 '11 at 18:22

Jordan Reiter

answered Sep 07 '11 at 17:56

Jordan Bouvier

4

Why not just `' '.join(sentence.split())`? – Paul Manta Sep 07 '11 at 18:00
yes, this is needlessly complicated I guess, constructing the same list from an original list, and there is a space between `' '` and `.join..` – steabert Sep 07 '11 at 18:25

3 Answers3