regex - How to remove extra white space between words inside a character vector using?

Question

asked Oct 24, 2021 in Technique[技术] by 深蓝 (71.8m points)

Suppose I have a character vector like

"Hi,  this is a   good  time to   start working   together.".

I just want to have

" Hi, this is a good time to start working together."

Only one white space between two words. How should I do this in R?

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1 Answer

深蓝 · Answer 1 · 2021-10-23T17:46:32+0000

gsub is your friend:

test <- "Hi,  this is a   good  time to   start working   together."
gsub("\s+"," ",test)
#[1] "Hi, this is a good time to start working together."

\s+ will match any space character (space, tab etc), or repeats of space characters, and will replace it with a single space " ".