Python Regular expression must strip whitespace except between quotes

Question

I need a way to remove all whitespace from a string, except when that whitespace is between quotes.

result = re.sub(\'\".*?\"\', \"\", content)

Answer 1

You can use shlex.split for a quotation-aware split, and join the result using " ".join. E.g.

print " ".join(shlex.split('Hello "world     this    is" a    test'))