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pythonstringxpathscrapy

Normalize whitespace with Python

I'm building a data extract using scrapy and want to normalize a raw string pulled out of an HTML document. Here's an example string:

  Sapphire RX460 OC  2/4GB

Notice two groups of two whitespaces preceeding the string literal and between OC and 2.

Python provides trim as described in How do I trim whitespace with Python? But that won't handle the two spaces between OC and 2, which I need collapsed into a single space.

I've tried using normalize-space() from XPath while extracting data with my scrapy Selector and that works but the assignment verbose with strong rightward drift:

product_title = product.css('h3').xpath('normalize-space((text()))').extract_first()

Is there an elegant way to normalize whitespace using Python? If not a one-liner, is there a way I can break the above line into something easier to read without throwing an indentation error, e.g.

product_title = product.css('h3')
    .xpath('normalize-space((text()))')
    .extract_first()
Solution

  • You can use:

    " ".join(s.split())

    where s is your string.