Replace consecutive whitespace with a single space

Sometimes we need to replace consecutive whitespace in a string with a single space. This is a good practice while parsing html files. Let me show you two ways of doing this.

First one is to split the string and join. Here is the code snippet:
>>> s = "a b c d e f"
>>> " ".join(s.split())
'a b c d e f'
You can check more string methods here: http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/lib/string-methods.html

Second method is to use regular expression. Here is the code:
>>> import re
>>> s = "a b c d e f"
>>> p = re.compile(r'\s+')
>>> data = p.sub(' ', s)
>>> data
'a b c d e f'