collapsespaces is a Django template tag that collapses whitespace characters between tags into one space.

collapsespacestag.py

"""collapsespaces is a Django template tag that collapses whitespace characters between tags into one space.

It is based on Django's 'spaceless' template tag (spaceless is different in that it completely removes whitespace between tags).

Why is this important?
Given "<span>5</span> <span>bottles</span>", collapsespaces will preserve the space between the two span elements--spaceless will not.
In a web browser:
"<span>5</span> <span>bottles</span>" renders as "5 bottles"
"<span>5</span><span>bottles</span>" renders as "5bottles"
"""

import re
from django import template
from django.utils.encoding import force_unicode
from django.utils.functional import allow_lazy

register = template.Library()

def collapse_spaces_between_tags(value):
    """Returns the given HTML with whitespace between tags collapsed to one space."""
    return re.sub(r'>\s+<', '> <', force_unicode(value))
collapse_spaces_between_tags = allow_lazy(collapse_spaces_between_tags, unicode)


class CollapseSpacesNode(template.Node):
    def __init__(self, nodelist):
        self.nodelist = nodelist

    def render(self, context):
        return collapse_spaces_between_tags(self.nodelist.render(context).strip())


def collapsespaces(parser, token):
    """
    Collapses whitespace between HTML tags into one space.

    Example usage::

        {% collapsespaces %}
            <p>
                <a href="foo/">Foo</a>
            </p>
        {% endcollapsespaces %}

    This example would return this HTML::

        <p> <a href="foo/">Foo</a> </p>

    Only space between *tags* is collapsed -- not space between tags and text.
    In this example, the space around ``Hello`` won't be collapsed::

        {% collapsespaces %}
            <strong>
                Hello
            </strong>
        {% endcollapsespaces %}
    """
    nodelist = parser.parse(('endcollapsespaces',))
    parser.delete_first_token()
    return CollapseSpacesNode(nodelist)
collapsespaces = register.tag(collapsespaces)

Great work! Thank you so much for sharing this.

Thanks for sharing indeed. Still golden after 7 years.