Update: rickoy, welcome to the Monastery!

The specification is a little unclear, but assuming you want to (a) remove all single spaces, and (b) squash all sequences of 2 or more spaces down to a single space:

#! perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = ' 2 0 1 2 - 7 - 2 7  9 : 3 7 : 3 1 ';
#             NB: 2 spaces here ^^

# (a) Remove single spaces
1 while $string =~ s/(^|[^ ])[ ]([^ ]|$)/$1$2/g;

# (b) Squash multiple spaces down to one
$string =~ s/[ ]{2,}/ /g;

print "'", $string, "'\n";

[download]

Outputs:

'2012-7-27 9:37:31'

[download]

HTH,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

In reply to Re: Removing extra spaces by Athanasius
in thread Removing extra spaces by rickoy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.