regex to remove all whitespaces except between brackets

Question

I\'ve been wrestling with an issue I was hoping to solve with regex.

Let\'s say I have a string that can contain any alphanumeric with the possibility of a substrin

Answer 1

The following will match start-of-line or end-of-bracket (which must come before any space you want to match) followed by anything that isn't start-of-bracket or a space, followed by some space.

/((^|\])[^ \[]*) +/

replacing "all" with $1 will remove the first block of spaces from each non-bracketed sequence. You will have to repeat the match to remove all spaces.

Example:

abcd efg [hij klm]nop qrst u
abcdefg [hij klm]nopqrst u
abcdefg[hij klm]nopqrstu
done