How to strip of mulitiple white spaces.

[shajias]

Hi all,

Suppose I am having a string like this.

mystr = " I have five spaces after this and 3 spaces after this and 10 spaces after this. How to remove this muliple whitespaces "

I just want to remove this multiple whitespaces and need the output like this

I have five spaces after this and 3 spaces after this and 10 spaces after this. How to remove this muliple whitespaces

Can anyone help me out please?

[shajias]

Since I couldnt retain the format which I wanted in the mail, I am rewording my question.

Hi all,

I am having adjacent multiple white spaces(both leading, trailing and in the middle) in a string. I want to strip off all the multiple white spaces and need to substitute multiple whitespaces by one white space there. Is there any way for that.?

I know that leading and trailing whitespaces can be stripped by rstrip and lstrip. But I couldnt do anythign with multiple whitespaces in the middle of a string

Can anybody help me out please?

~Sas

[dshimer]

I'm not sure this is particularly elegant, but it was my first thought.

origstrg='there   are some  places   with many      spaces'
newstrg=''
for word in origstrg.split():
    newstrg=newstrg+' '+word
print newstrg
 

which should come up as...
there are some places with many spaces

[ghostdog74]

Since I couldnt retain the format which I wanted in the mail, I am rewording my question.

Hi all,

I am having adjacent multiple white spaces(both leading, trailing and in the middle) in a string. I want to strip off all the multiple white spaces and need to substitute multiple whitespaces by one white space there. Is there any way for that.?

I know that leading and trailing whitespaces can be stripped by rstrip and lstrip. But I couldnt do anythign with multiple whitespaces in the middle of a string

Can anybody help me out please?

~Sas

1) you can strip off trailing and leading whitespaces using strip(). So there's no need for lstrip,rstrip
eg

>>> s = "    a string with leading and trailing spaces    "
>>> s.strip()
'a string with leading and trailing spaces'
 

2) if you know the number of multiple white spaces in the middle, eg 2 white spaces, you can use replace() , eg for 2 white spaces

>>> s = "a string  with multiple  white spaces"
>>> s.replace("  "," ")
'a string with multiple white spaces'
>>> 
 

3) if you don't know the number of white spaces in the middle, you can use split(), which i think is most straight forward :)

>>> s = "a string  with multiple    white          spaces"
>>> s.split()
['a', 'string', 'with', 'multiple', 'white', 'spaces']
>>> ' '.join(s.split())
'a string with multiple white spaces'
 

4) you can also use regular expression module eg

>>> import re
>>> s = "a string  with multiple    white          spaces"
>>> re.sub("\s+" , " ", s)
'a string with multiple white spaces'
 

[bvdet]

ghostdog,

Your option #3 also eliminates the leading and trailing spaces, therefore may be the best solution.

>>> s = "      a string  with multiple    white          spaces    "
>>> " ".join(s.split())
'a string with multiple white spaces'

The string method join is very efficient.

[bartonc]

ghostdog,

Your option #3 also eliminates the leading and trailing spaces, therefore may be the best solution.

>>> s = "      a string  with multiple    white          spaces    "
>>> " ".join(s.split())
'a string with multiple white spaces'

The string method join is very efficient.

That's exactly how I'd do it.