As for the newline issue, I thought of that, and then I thought that the OP quite possibly had data with tabs in it rather than multiple spaces. In that case you would want to match more than just spaces. You would also want to replace a single tab with a single space.

Besides which, the extra work is negligible - if you care about that small of an efficiency then Perl is probably the wrong language to use in the first place.


In reply to Re^3: Replace consecutive whitespaces with single whitespace by tilly
in thread Replace consecutive whitespaces with single whitespace by Anonymous Monk

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