removing 2 blanks from a string

coldfingertips has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need to remove every instance of a double-blank from a string leaving intact all original single spaced text.

I tried

my $string = "hi there world! La  la  12 12  14  :  19  :  hi";

$string =~ s/\s{2}//g;
[download]

But it fails and appears to remove nothing. Any pointers?

Comment on removing 2 blanks from a string Download Code

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Re: removing 2 blanks from a string by Fletch (Bishop) on Jun 20, 2006 at 17:21 UTC
Erm . . . `$ perl <<'EOT' heredoc> my $string = "hi there world! La la 12 12 14 : 19 : hi +"; heredoc> heredoc> $string =~ s/\s{2}//g; heredoc> print $string, "\n"; heredoc> EOT hi there world! Lala12 1214:19:hi` [download] Looks like it's removed any occurrence of exactly 2 space characters to me.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: removing 2 blanks from a string by sh1tn (Priest) on Jun 20, 2006 at 17:11 UTC
`$string =~ s/\s{2,}/ /g;` # the space in your replacement is missing	[reply] [d/l]
Re: removing 2 blanks from a string by swampyankee (Parson) on Jun 20, 2006 at 17:23 UTC
This sounds like a job for split()! `$string = join(' ', split(/ +/,$string));` [download] May work. Usually, I would split on white space, vs blanks, so I would usually do something like `$string = join(' ', split(/\s+/,$string));` [download] If this is part of a more general text processing issue, I'd suggest taking a look at Text::Wrap or Text::Autoformat emc e^(π√−1) = −1	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: removing 2 blanks from a string by rsriram (Hermit) on Jun 26, 2006 at 12:47 UTC
Try this, `$string =~ s/( )+/ /g;`	[reply] [d/l]