That will turn tabs into spaces (maybe not a bad thing, depending on the situation), and will turn the newline at the end into a space (usually a bad thing, depending on the situation).

So one should decide exactly what is needed, depending on the situation: 

# pick one of:
s/ +/ /g;  # just reduce strings of consecutive spaces
s/[ \xA0]+/ /g;  # reduce and normalize space/nbsp strings
s/[ \xA0\t]+/ /g;  # include tabs as well
s/\s+/ /g;   # all kinds of whitespace, including newlines

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In reply to Re^2: help! reading in special characters from file by graff
in thread help! reading in special characters from file by confused_programmer

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