Remove extra white space from inside a C string?

Question

I have read a few lines of text into an array of C-strings. The lines have an arbitrary number of tab or space-delimited columns, and I am trying to figure out how to remove

Answer 1

Here's an alternative function that squeezes out repeated space characters, as defined by isspace() in . It returns the length of the 'squidged' string.

#include 

size_t squidge(char *str)
{
    char *dst = str;
    char *src = str;
    char  c;
    while ((c = *src++) != '\0')
    {
        if (isspace(c))
        {
            *dst++ = ' ';
            while ((c = *src++) != '\0' && isspace(c))
                ;
            if (c == '\0')
                break;
        }
        *dst++ = c;
    }
    *dst = '\0';
    return(dst - str);
}

#include 
#include 

int main(void)
{
    char buffer[256];
    while (fgets(buffer, sizeof(buffer), stdin) != 0)
    {
        size_t len = strlen(buffer);
        if (len > 0)
            buffer[--len] = '\0';
        printf("Before: %zd <<%s>>\n", len, buffer);
        len = squidge(buffer);
        printf("After:  %zd <<%s>>\n", len, buffer);
    }
    return(0);
}