>>>I have a string that contains many spaces. For example
>>>
>>>

x = 'test1    test2 test3    test4  test5       test6'

>>>
>>>how can I format the string to contain only one space between the 'test' values. For example how do get it to do the following:
>>>
>>>

x = 'test1 test2 test3 test4 test5 test6'

>>>
>>>I thought about using strtran() command but I don't it works the way I want it too.
>>
>>Naomi's answer is simple and elegant.
>>
>>You can do the same thing with successive or nested STRTRAN() calls e.g.
>>

>>x = 'test1    test2 test3    test4  test5       test6'
>>
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 8 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 8 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 4 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 4 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 2 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>x = STRTRAN( x, SPACE( 2 ), SPACE( 1 ) )
>>
>>?x
>>* Above handles up to 64 spaces ( 8 x 8 )
>>* Adding 2 more lines at the top with SPACE( 16 ) would increase capacity to 256 spaces ( 16 x 16 )
>>* etc.
>>
>>* I suspect the FoxTools REDUCE() function may be a recursive implementation of the above
>>

>
>If your going to do that you should just put it in a loop
>

>x = 'test1    test2 test3    test4  test5       test6'
>DO WHILE SPACE(2) $ x
>   x = STRTRAN(x, '  ', ' ')
>ENDDO
>

Turns out I had a bug in my test code that made both our techniques look better than they actually are. See my second reply to Naomi.