removing of unnecessary spaces in text

user_19027516 0
Viewed 67


Could you please shed some light on this?
The spaces are not dealt properly (test C and E) and I don't understand what is wrong.
Thanks a lot.

foo={'testing':['this    is test A','  this is test B',' this is test C ','   this is test D','   this is test E  ']}
foo=pd.DataFrame(foo,columns=['testing']) 
print("Before:")
print(foo,"\n")
foo.replace(r'\s+', ' ', regex=True,inplace=True)
print("After:")
print(foo)

Before:
               testing
0    this    is test A
1       this is test B
2      this is test C 
3       this is test D
4     this is test E   

After:
            testing
0    this is test A
1    this is test B
2   this is test C 
3    this is test D
4   this is test E
str-replace python replace regex
3 Answers

It's probably easier to process the dictionary before constructing the dataframe. You also need to account for leading space in any of the strings.

import pandas as pd
import re

foo={'testing':['this    is test A','  this is test B',' this is test C ','   this is test D','   this is test E  ']}

foo['testing'] = [re.sub('\s+', ' ', s.strip()) for s in foo['testing']]

foo = pd.DataFrame(foo, columns=['testing'])

print(foo)

Output:

          testing
0  this is test A
1  this is test B
2  this is test C
3  this is test D
4  this is test E
user_175803810 
# remove leading and trailing space first; then use regex to replace space inside the strings
foo['testing'] = foo['testing'].str.strip().str.replace(r'\s+', ' ', regex=True)
print(foo)
          testing
0  this is test A
1  this is test B
2  this is test C
3  this is test D
4  this is test E
user_191231030

You can do it without regex:

foo["testing"] = foo["testing"].str.split().str.join(" ")
print(foo)

Prints:

          testing
0  this is test A
1  this is test B
2  this is test C
3  this is test D
4  this is test E
user_100359850
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