Question

def remove_whitespaces(value):
    "Remove all whitespaces"
    p = re.compile(r'\s+')
    return p.sub(' ', value)

The above code strips tags but doesn’t remove “all” whitespaces from the value.

Thanks

Answer 1

The fastest general approach eschews REs in favor of string’s fast, powerful .translate method:

import string
identity = string.maketrans('', '')

def remove_whitespace(value):
  return value.translate(identity, string.whitespace)

In 2.6, it’s even simpler, just

  return value.translate(None, string.whitespace)

Note that this applies to “plain” Python 2.* strings, i.e., bytestrings — Unicode’s strings’ .translate method is somewhat different — it takes a single argument which must be a mapping of ord values for Unicode characters to Unicode strings, or None for deletion. I.e., taking advantage of dict‘s handy .fromkeys classmethod:

nospace = dict.fromkeys(ord(c) for c in string.whitespace)

def unicode_remove_whitespace(value):
  return value.translate(nospace)

to remove exactly the same set of characters. Of course, Unicode also has more characters you could consider whitespace and want to remove — so you’d probably want to build a mapping unicode_nospace based on information from module unicodedata, rather than using this simpler approach based on module string.