in reply to Regular Expressions: Removing 'only' single spaces from a string

use warnings;
use strict;

my $str = "It is very  very cold now";

$str =~ s/(?<! ) (?! )//g;
print $str;

[download]

Prints Itisvery  verycoldnow which I doubt is what you want, but is what you asked for.

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

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Re^2: Regular Expressions: Removing 'only' single spaces from a string
by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 20, 2005 at 18:30 UTC

    or you could use $str =~ s/\b \b//g;

    Perl is Huffman encoded by design.
[reply]
[d/l]
      or you could use $str =~ s/\b \b//g;

      ...only if all the *non-space* characters are *word* characters:

      my $str = '@@@@ $$$ *** )))';
$str =~ s/\b \b//g;
print $str;

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Thanks GrandFather. That almost worked 100%. I have some strings where the is no clear word boundary. Specifically, something like this: 
      The boy to [ld his fat, her

      [download]
      In that example, \b is failing to remove the space after to, and before '[', as well as the space after ',', and before her. Would I need to use \B as well?
[reply]
[d/l]
        I found that the following works on both sample strings: 
        $string =~ s/(\S)\s(\S)/$1$2/g;

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

        See Not_a_Number's reply here. Use the look behind/look ahead approach I suggested here instead.

        Perl is Huffman encoded by design.
[reply]

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