How do I remove repeated spaces in a string?

Question

I have a string:

\"foo (2 spaces) bar (3 spaces) baaar (6 spaces) fooo\"

How do I remove repetitious spaces in it so there shou

Answer 1

Which method performs better?

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [i686-linux]

$ cat squeeze.rb 
require 'benchmark'
include Benchmark

string = "foo  bar   bar      baaar"
n = 1_000_000
bm(6) do |x|
  x.report("gsub      ") { n.times { string.gsub(/\s+/, " ") } }
  x.report("squeeze   ") { n.times { string.squeeze } }
  x.report("split/join") { n.times { string.split.join(" ") } }
end

$ ruby squeeze.rb 
            user     system      total        real
gsub        4.970000   0.020000   4.990000 (  5.624229)
squeeze     0.600000   0.000000   0.600000 (  0.677733)
split/join  2.950000   0.020000   2.970000 (  3.243022)