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

Important note: this is answer for Ruby on Rails, not plain ruby (both Activesupport and Facets are part of Rails gem)

To complement the other answers, note that both Activesupport and Facets provide String#squish ([update] caveat: it also removes newlines within the string):

>> "foo  bar   bar      baaar".squish
=> "foo bar bar baaar"