How to remove more than one space when reading text file

Question

Problem: I cannot seem to parse the information in a text file because python reads it as a full string not individual separate strings. The spaces between each variable is

Answer 1

You can instruct csv.reader to use space as delimiter and skip all the extra space:

reader = csv.reader(f, delimiter=" ", skipinitialspace=True)

For detailed information about available parameters check Python docs:

Dialect.delimiter A one-character string used to separate fields. It defaults to ','. Dialect.skipinitialspace When True, whitespace immediately following the delimiter is ignored. The default is False.

Answer 2

You can simply declare the delimiter to be a space, and ask csv to skip initial spaces after a delimiter. That way, your separator is in fact the regular expression ' +', that is one or more spaces.

rd = csv.reader(fd, delimiter=' ', skipinitialspace=True)
for row in rd:
    print row

['MOR125-1', 'MOR129-1', '0.587']
['MOR125-1', 'MOR129-3', '0.598']
['MOR129-1', 'MOR129-3', '0.115']