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POHow to strip variable spaces in each line of a text file based on special condition - one-liner in Python?
 

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  1. POHow to strip variable spaces in each line of a text file based on special condition - one-liner in Python?
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    <p>I have some data (text files) that is formatted in the most uneven manner one could think of. I am trying to minimize the amount of manual work on parsing this data. </p> <p><strong>Sample Data :</strong></p> <pre><code>Name Degree CLASS CODE EDU Scores -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Marshall CSC 78659944 89989 BE 900 Think Code DB I10 MSC 87782 1231 MS 878 Mary 200 Jones CIVIL 98993483 32985 BE 898 John G. S Mech 7653 54 MS 65 Silent Ghost Python Ninja 788505 88448 MS Comp 887 </code></pre> <p><strong>Conditions :</strong></p> <ul> <li>More than one spaces should be compressed to a delimiter (pipe better? End goal is to store these files in the database).</li> <li>Except for the first column, the other columns won't have any spaces in them, so all those spaces can be compressed to a pipe.</li> <li>Only the first column can have multiple words with spaces (Mary K Jones). The rest of the columns are mostly numbers and some alphabets. </li> <li>First and second columns are both strings. They almost always have more than one spaces between them, so that is how we can differentiate between the 2 columns. (If there is a single space, that is a risk I am willing to take given the horrible formatting!).</li> <li>The number of columns varies, so we don't have to worry about column names. All we want is to extract each column's data.</li> </ul> <p>Hope I made sense! I have a feeling that this task can be done in a oneliner. I don't want to loop, loop, loop :(</p> <p>Muchos gracias "Pythonistas" for reading all the way and not quitting before this sentence!</p>
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      1. POHow to strip variable spaces in each line of a text file based on special condition - one-liner in Python?
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    1. COThe data that you show looks like it once had tabs instead of spaces in it so that the data in each column would line up with the heading -- note that the headings are suitably spaced out. Are you quite sure that it becomes mangled BEFORE you receive it? Are you quite sure that there are no tabs still in the data? Note that the regex in the currently accepted answer is using `\s` which will match any whitespace character (i.e. matches tab as well as space) -- does the regex still "work" if you replace "\s" with " "?
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      1. POHow to strip variable spaces in each line of a text file based on special condition - one-liner in Python?
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    2. COThe spacing is so inconsistent, hence this route. I am replacing all the tabs (\t by 3 spaces). I am still checking regex version from SilentGhost. I might go with the previous variant, it just works. Slight room for error but that is something I am ready for, given the crazy formatting of these docs. Thank you!
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    3. COSo you are butchering your data by changing every tab to 3 spaces and you didn't tell us??? That's about a -100 where I come from, but I'll stop fuming and continue ...
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