Substitue spaces/tabs with single space excluding text within quotes

Written assisted by Claude.ai. It is long and possibly too complicated, but it works

Usage

collapse_spaces(x, preserve_newlines = TRUE)

Arguments

x

character string

preserve_newlines

flag to preserve new lines

Value

character string

Examples

collapse_spaces(c("cyl", "di sp","s e   d","d  e'dl  e'"))
#> Error in collapse_spaces(c("cyl", "di sp", "s e   d", "d  e'dl  e'")): could not find function "collapse_spaces"