Thanks for your response. I tried the regexp you posted and I'm still encountering a few problems. There are many lines that only contain a single space. Since there's still a space on the line it prevents the regexp from catching the \n{3,} occurrences. I should have specified in my original post that I need to catch all spaces that are preceded or followed by additional whitespace. Instead of just {space}{space} it should also check for {space}\s. How can I revise the regexp you posted to include that functionality? Document example after the regexp: 
\n{space}
\n{space}
\n{space}

[download]
All of the tabs in the document appear after a new line and since I'm preserving the new line characters I'm not worried about replacing the tabs with a space. Any tabs found in the middle of a line would be accidental but I'd still like to check for them and remove them if found.

In reply to Re^2: regexp: removing extra whitespace by perlmax
in thread regexp: removing extra whitespace by perlmax

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