use Perl

• You call that a spacey string? (Score:2)

  by bart (450) <bart.lateur@pandora.be> on 2007.09.07 5:30 (#57586) Journal

  This is

  "   a      spacey      string    "

  It's easy to quibble about readability with trivivial examples. But a "readable" language often implies "limited in power" too. So how would you solve the same problem with the added requirement that multiple spaces should be squashed into a single space? In Perl it's easy: you just have to add the additional statement:

  tr/ //s;

  or

  s/\s+/ /g;

  (Too bad tr doesn't recognize the \s meta character class.)

  So how do you tackle that in a readable language like Python? I don't know enough Python, let's stick to something I do know: PL/SQL, the (Ada-based) language Oracle includes in its databases:

  function normalize_spaces(s in varchar2) return varchar2 is
    r varchar2(32000);
  begin
    r := trim(s);
    while(instr(r, '  ') > 0) loop
      r := replace(r, '  ', ' ');
    end loop;
    return r;
  end;

  That's what "readability" buys you: a requirement for a lot of extra, very low level code. But, it least it's "readable"!

  I wouldn't be too surprised that in general, Python makes you jump through the same hoops, as Guido is notorious for ripping out features out of the language he considers too advanced.

  p.s. I like Javascript, and their solution really appeals to me:

  function normalize_space(s) {
    return s.replace(/^\s+/, '').replace(/\s+$/, '').replace(/\s+/g, ' ');
  }

  I really like chaining in this way. Much better than the nesting of procedural function calls that you have to write backwards — the last function to call is the first one you read in the source. And Javascript knows first class regular expressions (which are like qr// objects in Perl).

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