Remove duplicate spaces from string in Python

In this article, we will discuss different ways to delete duplicate spaces from a string in Python.

Table Of Contents

Suppose we have a string that contains some duplicate whitespaces,

"This is  a     simple       string"

After removing duplicate whitespaces from it, the final string should be like,

This is a simple string

There are different ways to do this. Let’s discuss them one by one,

Remove duplicate spaces from string using split() and join()

In Python, the string class provides a member function split(sep). it splits the string based on the given sep as the delimiter and returns a list of the words. By default it uses the whitespace character as delimeter and discard empty strings.

We can split the string into a list of words and then join back those words using single space as delimeter.

For example,

strValue = "This  is  a     simple       string"

# Remove all duplicate spaces in string
strValue = ' '.join( strValue.split() )

print(strValue)

Output:

This is a simple string

It removed all duplicate spaces from string in Python.

Remove duplicate spaces from string using Regex

In Python, the regex module provides a function to replace the contents of a string based on a matching regex pattern. The signature of function is like this,

sub(pattern, replacement_str, original_str)

It looks for the matches of the given regex pattern in the sting original_str and replaces all occurrences of matches with the string replacement_str.

A regex pattern “\s+” will match all the whitespaces in string. We can replace them by a single space character. This way we can replace duplicate spaces with single space.

For example,

import re

strValue = "This is  a     simple       string"

# Regex pattern to match all whitespaces in string
pattern = "\s+"

# Remove all duplicate spaces in string
strValue = re.sub(pattern, ' ', strValue )

print(strValue)

Output:

This is a simple string

It removed all duplicate spaces from string in Python.

Summary

We learned about two different ways to delete duplicate spaces from a string in Python.