collapsing whitespace in a string

Question

I have a string that kind of looks like this:

\"stuff   .  // : /// more-stuff .. .. ...$%$% stuff -> DD\"

and I want to strip off all p

Answer 1

One can use regular expression to substitute reoccurring white spaces. White space is given by \s with \s+ meaning: at least one.

import re
rex = re.compile(r'\s+')
test = "     x  y z           z"
res = rex.sub(' ', test)
print(f">{res}<")

> x y z z<

Note this also affects/includes carriage return, etc.