How to Change White Space to Character with Regular Expressions in Python

Learn how to replace multiple white spaces with a specific character using Python's regular expressions while keeping single spaces intact.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/74304669/ asked by the user 'crist_9' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/20390958/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/74304812/ provided by the user 'Barmar' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/1491895/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Changing White Spaces to a Character in Python

When working with text data in Python, it's common to encounter varying amounts of white space. Sometimes, we need to format this text correctly by replacing certain types of white spaces with a specific character. For instance, if you want to replace sequences of two or more white spaces with a semicolon while preserving single spaces, you might be wondering how to do that effectively.

The Problem

Consider you have a string that contains irregular spacing between words. Here’s an example:

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In the text above, you can see there are multiple spaces between the entries, which can make data processing cumbersome. You want to convert it into a cleaner format:

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Here, we need to replace any sequence of two or more spaces with a semicolon ;, while ensuring that single spaces remain unchanged.

The Solution

To achieve this, we can utilize Python's re module, which provides support for regular expressions. Regular expressions allow us to define complex patterns to search for and manipulate strings effectively.

Step-by-Step Implementation

Import the Regular Expression Module: Start by importing the re module in Python.

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Use re.split(): This function can split the string based on the pattern we define. In our case, we want to split where there are two or more spaces.

Define the Regular Expression:

\s matches any white space character (space, tab, newline, etc.).

{2,} indicates that we want to match two or more occurrences of white space.

Join the Resulting List: After splitting, use ';'.join() to reassemble the list into a single string with semicolons.

Here’s the complete code you can use:

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Explanation of the Code

re.split(r'\s{2,}', headers): This line splits the headers string into a list wherever there are two or more white spaces.

;.join(...): This will combine the items in the list back into a single string, separated by semicolons.

Conclusion

By using Python's re module, you can easily handle and format strings with varying amounts of white space. The ability to replace multiple spaces with a character while preserving single spaces is a valuable skill in data processing and text manipulation.

Now you can cleanly format your text data while ensuring the integrity of single spaces. Feel free to adapt the code for your specific needs in other projects!

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