Nope, none of them have any impact on the spaces b/w words.
They act on individual words rather than the expanded string as a
whole, perhaps a flag to :C and :S that indicated that the
substitution should be on the expanded string would do the trick.
Like :C/ /:/x or something?

--sjg

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 18:05:17 +1000, Luke Mewburn writes:
>On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 11:55:21PM -0700, Simon Gerraty wrote:
>  | 
>  | It regularly irks me needing to do things like:
>  | FOO!= echo ${VAR} | tr ' ' : 
>  | to get rid of the spaces between words in ${VAR} (eg for something
>  | that can be passed as say $PATH to a command.)
>  | 
>  | I'd like to add a modifier that allows one to set or even supress
>  | the character used to separate words in a variable expansion.
>  | Even if this only worked in conjunction with the :@ modifier it would
>  | be handy.
>  | 
>  | Before I burn precious cycles trying to come up with a name for this
>  | modifier does anyone have suggestions or violent objections?
>
>The existing  :C  doesn't suffice ?