Deleting specific control characters(\n \r \t) from a string

Question

I have quite large amount of text which include control charachters like \\n \\t and \\r. I need to replace them with a simple space--> \" \". What is the fastest way to do this

Answer 1

If you want to normalise whitespace (replace runs of one or more whitespace characters by a single space, and strip leading and trailing whitespace) this can be accomplished by using string methods:

>>> text = '   foo\tbar\r\nFred  Nurke\t Joe Smith\n\n'
>>> ' '.join(text.split())
'foo bar Fred Nurke Joe Smith'