In VB6, the phrase “normalizing spaces” does not refer to fixing abnormal spaces; it refers to removing excess spaces in a string. Some text processing routines (e.g., when working with a database) require the normalization of spaces in order to work properly—particularly when accepting data from the user, because you can never be sure that some extra spaces will not be included.

Normalizing means that you need to remove any trailing or
leading strings, which is easy to do with the Trim() function. It also means
that you will need to replace any sequence of 2 or more spaces that is present
within the string with a single space. This takes a little coding, but it is
quite simple with the Instr() and Replace() functions. The following function shows you
how:

Private Function NormalizeSpaces(s As String) As String



' Removes all leading and trailing spaces and

' replaces any occurrence of 2 or more spaces

' with a single space.



s = Trim(s)



Do While InStr(s, String(2, " ")) > 0
        s = Replace(s, String(2, " "), " ")

Loop


NormalizeSpaces = s

End Function

Keep this function in your toolbox and you’ll be ready whenever you need to normalize strings.

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