NLP String Manipulation | Dataford Interview Questions

Solve a classic string manipulation problem often found in NLP pre-processing.

Given a string, return its words in reverse order, separated by exactly one space. Treat spaces, tabs, newlines, and their escaped text forms (\\t, \ , \\r) as separators. Remove leading and trailing separators and return an empty string when no words exist.

Function: reverse_words(text)

Examples: "alpha beta gamma" returns "gamma beta alpha"; " tokenize\\tclean text " returns "text clean tokenize".

Constraints

0 <= len(text) <= 10^4
Words may be separated by spaces, tabs, newlines, carriage returns, or escaped forms of those characters
The output contains exactly one space between adjacent words
Word characters are preserved exactly

Function Signature

def reverse_words(text):

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