Question

I’m using the following regex to capture a fixed width ‘description’ field that is always 50 characters long:

(?.{50}) 

My problem is that the descriptions sometimes contain a lot of whitespace, e.g.

'FLUID        COMPRESSOR                          ' 

Can somebody provide a regex that:

1. Trims all whitespace off the end
2. Collapses any whitespace in between words to a single space

Answer 1

Substitute two or more spaces for one space:

s/  +/ /g 

Edit: for any white space (not just spaces) you can use \s if you’re using a perl-compatible regex library, and the curly brace syntax for number of occurrences, e.g.

s/\s\s+/ /g 

or

s/\s{2,}/ /g 

Edit #2: forgot the /g global suffix, thanks JL