Remove unwanted spaces between quotations

user_15911262 0
Viewed 1096

Is there a more elegant way to remove spaces between quotations (despite using code like this:

input = input.replace('" 12 "', '"12"')`)

from a sentence like this:

 At " 12 " hours " 35 " minutes my friend called me.

Thing is that numbers can change, and then the code won't work correctly. :)

removing-whitespace python regex
3 Answers

You can use regular expressions as long as your quotations are reasonably sane:

re.sub(r'"\s*([^"]*?)\s*"', r'"\1"', input)

The pattern reads as "quote, any number of spaces, stuff that's not a quote (captured), followed by any number of spaces and a quote. The replacement is just the thing you captured in quotes.

Notice that the quantifier in the capture group is reluctant. That ensures that you don't capture the trailing spaces.

user_29887300

You can try using a regular expression, such as the one below:

"\s+(.*?)\s+"

This matches any substring of any length containing any character which is not a newline, surrounded by whitespace and quotation marks. By passing this to re.compile(), you can use the returned Pattern object to call the sub() method.

>>> import re
>>> string = 'At " 12 " hours " 35 " minutes my friend called me.'
>>> regex = re.compile(r'"\s+(.*?)\s+"')
>>> regex.sub(r'"\1"', string)
'At "12" hours "35" minutes my friend called me.'

The \1 calls for the first group to be substituted, in this case the string matched by .*?

user_137463890

Here's a solution I came up with real quick that will work for any numbers you input.

input = 'At " 12 " hours " 35 " minutes my friend called me.'

input = input.split()

for count, word in enumerate(input):
    if input[count] == '"':
        del input[count]
    if input[count].isdigit():
        input[count] = '"' + input[count] + '"'

str1 = ' '.join(input)
print('Output:')
print(str1)

Output:

>>> Output:
>>> At "12" hours "35" minutes my friend called me.
user_159110230
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