It would be nice if a function equivalent to Qt's QString::simplified() would be added to Python's strings (cf. http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qstring.html#simplified ).

I'm not sure if my approach is good or fast, but I added this function to my code like so: http://nasauber.de/blog/T/143/QString_simplified_in_Python

This is too specialized function to be included in the stdlib ar added as a method to base class.

There are simpler and faster implementations of this function:

    def simplify(s):
        return ' '.join(s.strip().split())

or

    def simplify(s):
        return re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', s.strip())

Due to they simplicity there is no need to add them in Python.

Actually, we more or less already do have this function in the stdlib, (I'd guess it is for pretty much the same reason that QT has it), except ours can also truncate sensibly to a given width:

  >>> import textwrap
  >>> textwrap.shorten('  lots\t of\nwhitespace\r\n ', 99999)
  'lots of whitespace'
  >>> textwrap.shorten('  lots\t of\nwhitespace\r\n ', 15)
  'lots of [...]'


That said, if you want *just* the white-space-stripping, the ' '.join(s.strip().split()) expression is just as useful and (for what it is worth) faster.