addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Wise ones,

I'm a newbie to perl and I need some help with regular expressions to do some string manipulation.
The first thing I want to be able to do is add a space where there are capital letters, except right at the beginning of a sentence. At first I thought split would work, but this removes the capital letter. This is basically what I want to achieve:

HelloMyNameIsJake = Hello My Name Is Jake

The second thing I want to do is reduce all whitespace to a single space char. So any number of single spaces, tabs or newlines would become just " ".

I would be grateful if anyone out there can help me with this and perhaps give me a break down of what you have done so I understand it for the future.

Many thanks, Jake

Comment on addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space

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Re: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by esskar (Deacon) on Feb 19, 2005 at 15:28 UTC
1: `my $text = "HelloMyNameIsJake"; $text =~ s!(.)([A-Z])!$1 $2!g; print "[$text]";` [download] 2: `my $text = "So much spaces,\t\t\t\t\t\ttabs and\n\n\n\n\n\n\ +n newlines"; $text =~ s!\s+! !g; print $text;` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by ambrus (Abbot) on Feb 19, 2005 at 15:38 UTC
For inserting spaced before capital letters, see the recent thread Splitting on non-initial uppercase without split.	[reply]
Re: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by betterworld (Curate) on Feb 19, 2005 at 16:18 UTC
How about this: `my $s="HelloMyNameIsJake AndThisIsTooMuchSpace"; my @a= $s =~ m/([A-Z][a-z]*)/g; print "@a";` [download] Note that this treats special characters and spaces alike.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by sh1tn (Priest) on Feb 19, 2005 at 15:33 UTC
Capital letters to white spaces: `$string =~ s/([A-Z])/ $1/g;` [download] All whitespaces to a single space char: `$string =~ s/(\s+)/ /gm;` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by prasadbabu (Prior) on Feb 19, 2005 at 15:37 UTC
Sht1tn OP has asked that white space is not allowed at the beginning of the sentence. Also he asked more that one spaces or tabs or newlines. So your answers wont work for the above conditions. update:when you are updating your node, use update in your node. Prasad	[reply]
Re^3: addd spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by sh1tn (Priest) on Feb 19, 2005 at 16:06 UTC
IMHO - no need for $1 and $2 capturing: `$string =~ s/(?<=.)([A-Z])/ $1/g;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: add spaces after caps & reduce whitespace to single space by Tanktalus (Canon) on Feb 19, 2005 at 16:21 UTC
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