How to remove repeating spaces

[Jim Ault]

On Nov 2, 2009, at 3:54 PM, Mark Schonewille wrote:

> Bill:
> put replacetext(fld "Spaces","[ ]+"," ") into fld "Spaces"
>
> Mark Schonewille
>
> On 3 nov 2009, at 00:51, Bill Vlahos wrote:
>
>> I want to remove repeating spaces in a field. I can write a brute  
>> force method but before I do that I'd like to see if someone has  
>> already invented this wheel.
>>
>> Basically all I want to do is reduce all multiple instances of  
>> spaces in a field to a single space. There could be double, triple,  
>> or more spaces together and I want to reduce them all to just one.
>>
>> I can think of a repeating loop that replaces two spaces with one  
>> and just do it until there aren't any more or do a series of  
>> replaces four spaces with one, then three spaces with one, then two  
>> spaces with one but neither of these seem very elegant.
>>
>> Bill Vlahos


Additionally if you want to remove (trim) single spaces from either  
side of each line you could add

get fld "Spaces"
repeat for each line LNN in IT
    put word 1 to -1 of LNN & cr after newLines
end repeat
put replacetext( char 1 to -2 of newLines ,"[ ]+"," ") into fld "Spaces"


Hope this helps,

Jim Ault
Las Vegas