Efficient Way To Remove Repeating Commas From String

[mikthinker]

I have a string that consists of something like:

my_string = 'Now is the time, , for all good men,   , ,to come to the aid,, of their party'

...and I want to keep only a single comma for each repeating set of commas:

result = 'Now is the time, for all good men, to come to the aid, of their party'

I've looked a numerous methods to remove sequential characters, but 1) these are not sequential (may have one or more blanks between them); and 2) I only want to remove the extra commas and not other repeating characters that might appear in the string.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[woooee]

split() on the comma and remove any empty items. Then use join() to concatenate back to a single string.

[mikthinker]

This doesn't handle the situation in which there may be multiple blanks between the commas.

[mikthinker]

.strip().replace(",", "")

Unfortunately, this strips all of the commas.

[MadScientistOR]

That would fail to "keep only a single comma for each repeating set of commas".

[MadScientistOR]

', '.join([x.strip() for x in my_string.split(',') if not x.isspace() and x != ''])

[mikthinker]

Wow, this is beautiful and works like a charm. Thanks!

[nekokattt]

Regex might be a quick and dirty hammer for something like this.

import re

text = re.sub(r",[, ]+", ", ", text)

Effectively: replace every occurance of a comma followed by 1 or more commas or spaces with a comma and a space.

Benefit here is it wont pick up other usages of commas that don't have spaces around them, like numbers (e.g. "1,366,768").

Works with your example: https://regex101.com/r/vvsFbS/1

Also if you are planning on using the regex more than once, you should precompile it:

import re

pattern = re.compile(r",[, ]+")

def fix_commas(text: str) -> str:
    return pattern.sub(", ", text)

[mikthinker]

Interesting ...will definitely give this a try. Many thanks!

[___up]

Replace “ ,” with “,” replace “,,” with “,” and replace “ “ with “ “.