Remove space delimited single characters

Question

I have texts that look like this:

the quick brown fox 狐狸 m i c r o s o f t マ イ ク ロ ソ フ ト jumps over the lazy dog 跳過懶狗 best wishes : John Doe

What's a good regex (for python) that can remove the single-characters so that the output looks like this:

the quick brown fox 狐狸 jumps over the lazy dog 跳過懶狗 best wishes John Doe

I've tried some combinations of \s{1}\S{1}\s{1}\S{1}, but they inevitably end up removing more letters than I need.

Answer 1

You can replace the following with empty string:

(?<!\S)\S(?!\S).?

Match a non-space that has no non-spaces on either side of it (i.e. surrounded by spaces), plus the character after that (if any).

The reason why I used negative lookarounds is because it neatly handles the start/end of string case. We match the extra character that follows the \S to remove the space as well.

Regex101 Demo