Question

I have a string like this

"a           a            a  a aaa b c d e f a g a aaa  aa           a       a"

I want to turn it into either

"a b c d e f a g a"

or

"a                        b c d e f a g a                   "

(whichever’s easier, it doesn’t matter since it’ll be HTML)

"a"s are line breaks ( \r\n ), in case that changes anything.

Answer 1

Went with this:

private string GetDescriptionFor(HtmlDocument document)
{
    string description = CrawlUsingMetadata(XPath.ResourceDescription, document);
    Regex regex = new Regex(@"(\r\n(?:[ ])*|\n(?:[ ])*){3,}", RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);//(?:[^\S\r\n|\n]*\1)+

    string result = regex.Replace(description, "\n\n");
    string decoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(result);
    return decoded;
}

It does, as it’s supposed to, ignore all line breaks except cases where it matches three or more continuous line breaks, ignoring whitespace, and replaces those matches with \n\n.