How do I remove repeated spaces in a string?

Question

I have a string:

\"foo (2 spaces) bar (3 spaces) baaar (6 spaces) fooo\"

How do I remove repetitious spaces in it so there shou

Answer 1

Use a regular expression to match repeating whitespace (\s+) and replace it by a space.

"foo    bar  foobar".gsub(/\s+/, ' ')
=> "foo bar foobar"

This matches every whitespace, as you only want to replace spaces, use / +/ instead of /\s+/.

"foo    bar  \nfoobar".gsub(/ +/, ' ')
=> "foo bar \nfoobar"