239 – Collapse runs of consecutive spaces

239 – Collapse runs of consecutive spaces#

You can collapse runs of adjacent spaces by replacing two consecutive spaces by a single one until you get to a fixed point:

from functools import partial, Placeholder as _P

replacer = partial(str.replace, _P, "  ", " ")
string = "This is  a   perfectly    normal     sentence."

print(fixedpoint(replacer, string))  # This is a perfectly normal sentence.

You need the fixed point because replacing once isn’t enough:

print(string.replace("  ", " "))  # This is a  perfectly  normal   sentence.