The overhead in looping through the string and replacing double spaces with single ones is taking too much time. Is a faster way of trying to replace multi spacing in strings with a single whitespace?
I've been doing it like this, but it's just way too long and wasteful:
str1 = "This is a foo bar sentence with crazy spaces that irritates my program "
def despace(sentence):
while " " in sentence:
sentence = sentence.replace(" "," ")
return sentence
print despace(str1)
look at this
In [1]: str1 = "This is a foo bar sentence with crazy spaces that irritates my program "
In [2]: ' '.join(str1.split())
Out[2]: 'This is a foo bar sentence with crazy spaces that irritates my program'
The method split() returns a list of all the words in the string, using str as the separator (splits on all whitespace if left unspecified)
Using regular expressions:
import re
str1 = re.sub(' +', ' ', str1)
' +' matches one or more space characters.
You can also replace all runs of whitespace with
str1 = re.sub('\s+', ' ', str1)
