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I am importing an excel sheet into Mathematica. The result is a rectangular array. The array contains sequences of commas. Whenever a cell is empty in the Excel sheet consecutive commas appear in the imported array. How to get rid of them? So I am looking for a function $f$ such that for example

f({1,2,3,2,1,,,,6,5,4,3,,,,8})={1,2,3,2,1,6,5,4,3,8}

It doesn't look easy to me because it looks like reinventing the wheel.

Any help will be much appreciated.

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    $\begingroup$ I expect that those sequences of commas are actually separating empty strings (""), so you can replace them with e.g. Nothing and they will be spliced away. For instance, {{1, "", 2}, {"", 2, 3}} /. "" -> Nothing gives {{1, 2}, {2, 3}}. $\endgroup$
    – MarcoB
    Commented Mar 1, 2021 at 19:53
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    $\begingroup$ Or try {1, 2, , , 3} /. Null -> Nothing $\endgroup$
    – LouisB
    Commented Mar 1, 2021 at 20:03
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, I'll try that right away. $\endgroup$
    – Georgy
    Commented Mar 1, 2021 at 22:21

3 Answers 3

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DeleteCases[{1, 2, 3, 2, 1, , , , 6, 5, 4, 3, , , , 8}, Null]
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Remove empty words ("") or Null by replacing by Sequence[]

In[1]:= list = {1,2,3,2,1,,,,6,5,4,3,,,,8};

In[2]:= list /. {Null -> Sequence[], "" -> Sequence[]}

Out[2]= {1,2,3,2,1,6,5,4,3,8}
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f[L_List] := Map[If[# === Null, Nothing, #] &, L]
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