How to replace multiple white spaces with one white space

string cleanedString = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(dirtyString,@"\s+"," ");

This question isn't as simple as other posters have made it out to be (and as I originally believed it to be) - because the question isn't quite precise as it needs to be.

There's a difference between "space" and "whitespace". If you only mean spaces, then you should use a regex of " {2,}". If you mean any whitespace, that's a different matter. Should all whitespace be converted to spaces? What should happen to space at the start and end?

For the benchmark below, I've assumed that you only care about spaces, and you don't want to do anything to single spaces, even at the start and end.

Note that correctness is almost always more important than performance. The fact that the Split/Join solution removes any leading/trailing whitespace (even just single spaces) is incorrect as far as your specified requirements (which may be incomplete, of course).

The benchmark uses MiniBench.

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using MiniBench;

internal class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {

        int size = int.Parse(args[0]);
        int gapBetweenExtraSpaces = int.Parse(args[1]);

        char[] chars = new char[size];
        for (int i=0; i < size/2; i += 2)
        {
            // Make sure there actually *is* something to do
            chars[i*2] = (i % gapBetweenExtraSpaces == 1) ? ' ' : 'x';
            chars[i*2 + 1] = ' ';
        }
        // Just to make sure we don't have a \0 at the end
        // for odd sizes
        chars[chars.Length-1] = 'y';

        string bigString = new string(chars);
        // Assume that one form works :)
        string normalized = NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin(bigString);


        var suite = new TestSuite<string, string>("Normalize")
            .Plus(NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin)
            .Plus(NormalizeWithRegex)
            .RunTests(bigString, normalized);

        suite.Display(ResultColumns.All, suite.FindBest());
    }

    private static readonly Regex MultipleSpaces = 
        new Regex(@" {2,}", RegexOptions.Compiled);

    static string NormalizeWithRegex(string input)
    {
        return MultipleSpaces.Replace(input, " ");
    }

    // Guessing as the post doesn't specify what to use
    private static readonly char[] Whitespace =
        new char[] { ' ' };

    static string NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin(string input)
    {
        string[] split = input.Split
            (Whitespace, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
        return string.Join(" ", split);
    }
}

A few test runs:

c:\Users\Jon\Test>test 1000 50
============ Normalize ============
NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin  1159091 0:30.258 22.93
NormalizeWithRegex        26378882 0:30.025  1.00

c:\Users\Jon\Test>test 1000 5
============ Normalize ============
NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin  947540 0:30.013 1.07
NormalizeWithRegex        1003862 0:29.610 1.00


c:\Users\Jon\Test>test 1000 1001
============ Normalize ============
NormalizeWithSplitAndJoin  1156299 0:29.898 21.99
NormalizeWithRegex        23243802 0:27.335  1.00

Here the first number is the number of iterations, the second is the time taken, and the third is a scaled score with 1.0 being the best.

That shows that in at least some cases (including this one) a regular expression can outperform the Split/Join solution, sometimes by a very significant margin.

However, if you change to an "all whitespace" requirement, then Split/Join does appear to win. As is so often the case, the devil is in the detail...

A regular expressoin would be the easiest way. If you write the regex the correct way, you wont need multiple calls.

Change it to this:

string s = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(s, @"\s{2,}", " "); 

While the existing answers are fine, I'd like to point out one approach which doesn't work:

public static string DontUseThisToCollapseSpaces(string text)
{
    while (text.IndexOf("  ") != -1)
    {
        text = text.Replace("  ", " ");
    }
    return text;
}

This can loop forever. Anyone care to guess why? (I only came across this when it was asked as a newsgroup question a few years ago... someone actually ran into it as a problem.)