Introduction
For a full overview of RegEx visit this article.
There are several ways to use Regex to minimize spacing in a string and the way you choose will depend on what you desire for your end result.
The simplest pattern to do this would be to use "\s+" as your find pattern and "[ ]" as your replace pattern. This would replace any group of Unicode whitespace characters (including line breaks) with a single space.
If you want a more discerning approach, then try one of the following pattern combinations:
| Find Pattern | Replace Pattern | Description |
[\t ]+
|
[ ]
| Replaces groups of tabs or spaces with a single space. |
([\t ])\1+
|
$1
| Uses a backreference to target groups of only tabs or only spaces. For example, if a group of spaces is followed by a group of tabs, it will keep one tab and one space. |
([\t ]|(?:\r\n))\1+
|
$1
| Same as above, except this pattern considers line breaks as well.
|
