Is there a simple way to remove multiple spaces in a string?

Question

Suppose this string:

The   fox jumped   over    the log.

Turning into:

Answer 1

The fastest you can get for user-generated strings is:

if '  ' in text:
    while '  ' in text:
        text = text.replace('  ', ' ')

The short circuiting makes it slightly faster than pythonlarry's comprehensive answer. Go for this if you're after efficiency and are strictly looking to weed out extra whitespaces of the single space variety.