Source: 📖 Python Cookbook ch2.11 p54

Replacing text with re.sub()

There are some cases where the sub() function from the re library is more useful than the .replace() string method. For example, say you need to replace repeated blank space in the middle of a string.

import re

s = 'hello      world'
replaced = re.sub('\s+', ' ', s)	# replace multiple spaces with 1
# 'hello world'