Text Manipulation

Hi, is there a way i can replace multiple white spaces & tabs into one , on a TEXT column ?

I am using replace function and trying to store the result into a varchar variable and the TEXT being truncated after 255 charecters.

for example, I tried this :

declare @str varchar(4000)
select @str = replace(cast(textcolumn as varchar(4000)), ' ', NULL)

I understand t-SQL dml statement(s)
will automatically truncate after 255 chars in a long string. But, seeking for other options here pls.

thanks for ur help..