Python Regular expression must strip whitespace except between quotes

Question

I need a way to remove all whitespace from a string, except when that whitespace is between quotes.

result = re.sub(\'\".*?\"\', \"\", content)

Answer 1

Here is a one-liner version, based on @kindall's idea - yet it does not use regex at all! First split on ", then split() every other item and re-join them, that takes care of whitespaces:

stripWS = lambda txt:'"'.join( it if i%2 else ''.join(it.split())
    for i,it in enumerate(txt.split('"'))  )

Usage example:

>>> stripWS('This is a string with some "text in quotes."')
'Thisisastringwithsome"text in quotes."'