Remove multiple spaces from python list elements

Suppose this is you string

string = "A     b       c   "

And you want it in this way

Abc

What you can do is

string2 = " ".join(string.split())
print(string2)

The easiest way is to build a new list of the values with the spaces removed. For this, you can use list comprehensions and the idiom proposed by @CodeWithYash

old_list = ['ENTRY', '      102725023         CDS       T01001']
new_list = [" ".join(string.split()) for s in old_list]

Note that this works because the default behavior of split is:

split according to any whitespace, and discard empty strings from the result.

If you would want to remove anything but whitespace, you would have to implement you own function, maybe using regular expression.

Note also that in Python strings are immutable: you can not edit each item of the list in place. If you do not want to create a new list (for example, if a reference to the list is kept in other place of the program), you can change every item:

l = ['ENTRY', '      102725023         CDS       T01001']
for i, s in enumerate(l):
    old_list[i] = " ".join(s.split())
print(l)

Output:

['ENTRY', '102725023 CDS T01001']

I wrote this function:

s = "   abc       def     xyz    "
def proc(s):
    l = len(s)
    s = s.replace('  ',' ')
    while len(s) != l:
        l = len(s)
        s = s.replace('  ',' ')
    if s[0] == ' ':
        s = s[1:]
    if s[-1] == ' ':
        s = s[:-1]
    return s
print(proc(s))

the idea is to keep replacing every two spaces with 1 space, then check if the first and last elements are also spaces I don't know if there exists an easier way with regular expressions or something else.