How do I modify the values of an iterator in Python?

Question

As a side project, I'm making a basic HTML parser. The HTML comes in as a string, and I make an iterator for it. I need to remove groups of whitespace at certain points, eg if the character is whitespace, I'd like to consume it, remove it, and advance one by one until I hit a non-whitespace character, where the function would stop.

Iterator setup:

from more_itertools import peekable
chars = peekable("</        html    >")

For example:

"</        html    >

...becomes:

"</html    >"

Answer 1

I think the filter function is what you are looking for.

An example:

import string
text = "</        html    >"

for c in filter(lambda x: x not in string.whitespace, text):
    print(c, end="")

The output is </html>