CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlistwhitespaceremoving-whitespace
Vash
Vash

Reputation: 141

How would I eliminate spacing, line breaks to have a space-delimited string for each string within my list python

Hi everyone I am pretty new to python and wanted some help. I have some sample data and wanted to know how would I get rid of spacing for each string within each list.

data = [
 ['In dolore     .'], ['Voluptatum.    '],
 ['Veniam hic non minima.         '],
 ['Dolores       Quis enim'], 
 ['     sequi ducimus']
 ]
 print data

The Output I desire: 

data = [
 ['In dolore.'], ['Voluptatum.'],
 ['Veniam hic non minima.'],
 ['Dolores Quis enim'], 
 ['sequi ducimus']
 ]

Here are the two ways I thought would work but didn't

for i in data:
str = ''.join(data)
final_data = str.replace("  ","")
print final_data

my final attempt was this:

final_data = ''.join(data) 
final_data.replace("  ", "") 
print final_data

Upvotes: 1

Views: 98

Answers (3)

Nick Chapman
Nick Chapman

Reputation: 4634

You can use regex here

import re
for i in range(len(data)):
    data[i][0] = re.sub(r'(\w)\s\s+(\w)', r'\1 \2', data[i][0])
    data[i][0] = re.sub(r'\s\s+', r'', data[i][0])
    data[i][0] = re.sub(r"(\w)\s([.])", r"\1\2", dat[i][0])

The regex pattern \s\s+ matches all groups of 2 or more whitespace characters. As noted that would eliminate spacing between words if there was more than 1 space between two words. The r'\w\s\s+\w', r'\1 \2' takes care of that by eliminating the spaces between word boundaries with a single space.

Also note that it's data[i][0] because strangely the data is a list of lists.

Upvotes: 5

yinnonsanders
yinnonsanders

Reputation: 1871

import re
final_data = [[re.sub('\s+\.', '.', re.sub('\s+', ' ', s)).strip()] for l in data for s in l]
print final_data

[['In dolore.'], ['Voluptatum.'], ['Veniam hic non minima.'], ['Dolores Quis enim'], ['sequi ducimus']]

This way leading and trailing whitespaces are removed, while internal spaces are not eliminated entirely.

The inner substitution replaces multiple whitespace characters with a single spaces, and the outer substitution eliminates whitespace characters before a period. The strip function eliminates leading and trailing whitespace.

Upvotes: 2

pyCthon
pyCthon

Reputation: 12361

print [[s.replace(" ","")] for l in data for s in l ]

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions