Stripping whitespace

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:05:01 -0800, Paul Rubin wrote:

> ryan k <ryan at ryankaskel.com> writes:
>> Hello. I have a string like 'LNAME
>> PASTA               ZONE'. I want to create a list of those words and
>> basically replace all the whitespace between them with one space so i
>> could just do lala.split(). Thank you!
> 
> import re
> s = 'LNAME  PASTA        ZONE'
> re.split('\s+', s)

Please tell me you're making fun of the poor newbie and didn't mean to 
seriously suggest using a regex merely to split on whitespace?

>>> import timeit
>>> timeit.Timer("s.split()", "s = 'one   two  three     four'").repeat()
[1.4074358940124512, 1.3505148887634277, 1.3469438552856445]
>>> timeit.Timer("re.split('\s+', s)", "import re;s = 'one   two  
three     four'").repeat()
[7.9205508232116699, 7.8833441734313965, 7.9301259517669678]





-- 
Steven