Sorting and removing duplicate words in a line

Question

The sort command lets me put lines in alphabetical order and remove duplicate lines. I need something similar that can sort the words on a single line, put them

Answer 1

The shell was built to parse [:blank:] seperated word lists already. Therefore the use of xargs is completely redundant. The "unique" stuff can be done but its just easier to use sort.

echo $(printf '%s\n' zebra ant spider spider ant zebra ant | sort -u)