How to remove tabs and newlines with a regex

Question

In Python 3.x, the special re sequence '\s' matches Unicode whitespace characters including [ \t\n\r\f\v].

The following piece of code is intended to replace tabs and newlines with a space.

import re
text = """Hello my friends.
    How are you doing?
I'm fine."""
output = re.sub('\s', ' ', text)
print(output)

However, the tab is still present in output. Why?

Answer 1

The problem is(likely) that your tab character is just a bunch of spaces.

>>> re.sub(r"\s+", " ", text)
"Hello my friends. How are you doing? I'm fine."