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 not a \t which is why it does not separate. Is there a way for python to flexibly remove the spaces and put a comma or \t instead?

Example DATA:

MOR125-1   MOR129-1   0.587
MOR125-1   MOR129-3   0.598
MOR129-1   MOR129-3   0.115

The code I am using:

with open("Distance_Data_No_Bootstrap_RAW.txt","rb") as f:
reader = csv.reader(f,delimiter="\t")
d=list(reader)
for i in range(3):
    print d[i]

Output: ['MOR125-1 MOR129-1 0.587'] ['MOR125-1 MOR129-3 0.598'] ['MOR129-1 MOR129-3 0.115']

Desired Output:

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

Answer 1

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']

Answer 2

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.