is there a fancy way to replace multiple consecutive whitespaces with single whitespaces ? or do i j...

# announcements

[LastExceed]

is there a fancy way to replace multiple consecutive whitespaces with single whitespaces ? or do i just repeatedly do .replace(" ", " ") until the string doesnt change?

[Casey Brooks]

Use Regex: .replace("\\s+".toRegex(), "")

[LastExceed]

oh cool

[Chilli]

Wouldn't that remove all the spaces? I believe the 2nd parameter should be " ", not ""

[Casey Brooks]

@Chilli yes, you’re right, my bad. .replace("\\s+".toRegex(), " ")

[Chilli]

Wouldn't regex be an overkill, though? I'm not sure how fast regex actually is but it seems there might be something faster

[Jakub Pi]

No, this is the kind of problem regular expressions were designed to solve. Any regex is transformable to a finite state machine, so it just depends on the efficiency of the compiler. The only alternative is hand coding it, which is indeed overkill.

[Kroppeb]

This is a very easy regex, but I would store the pattern though.

[dewildte]

Regex is built for this and is so fast.
Another solution is to build your own parser/ parser combinator. But Regex is the perfect solution for a one off.