Removing all of empty characters in Python-CodePudding

I want to replace all of the empty characters with single empty character. I tried this:

import re

fin = open("toutput_des.txt", "r")
fout = open("toutput2_des.txt", "w")

for line in fin:
    fout.write(re.sub('\s ',' ',line))
    
fin.close()
fout.close()

It worked but it also replaced "new line" character at the end of each line with a single empty character. If I want to exclude the "new line" how can I modify regex? I also tried '\s \b' but it deleted all of the contents of the file.

CodePudding user response：

You may simply append the newline back after replacing.

However, you do not need a regex here, you can use

for line in fin:
    fout.write(' '.join(line.split())   '\n')

Note that line.split() splits the string with any whitespace while removing leading and trailing whitespaces, and ' '.join(...) joins the items back with a single space.

If you need to use a regex solution, then you can subtract \n from \s:

re.sub(r'[^\S\n] ', ' ', line)

The [^\S\n] regex matches any one or more chars other than non-whitespace and line feed char, i.e. it matches any whitespace chars but line feed chars. You probably also want to .lstrip() the result.