Strings in Python are immutable (meaning that their data cannot be modified) so the replace method doesn't modify the string - it returns a new string. You could fix your code as follows:

for i in hello:
    j = i.replace(' ','')
    k.append(j)

However a better way to achieve your aim is to use a list comprehension. For example the following code removes leading and trailing spaces from every string in the list using strip:

hello = [x.strip(' ') for x in hello]

I think you are conflating the list and the representation of the list. The list itself doesn't have spaces, or even commas, it just has the items (in your case, the numbers). The representation of the list is just that - a way to represent the data inside of it in a normal, standard way. That standard includes commas and spaces.

If you want a new thing that represents the list and its items in the way you are saying, you can do that by making a new string just like that.

str(numbers).replace(' ','')

This has two functions in it, chained together. First, we do str(numbers) to get a string that is the string-representation of the list. This will be the string '[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]'. Then you replace any blank space-bar ' ' with nothing ''.

Edit:

I think I read your question too quickly and see that you did the exact same as what I have in my code here and said it isn't doing exactly what you want to do. I think the answer here is: no.

As I say in my first paragraph, there is the list and there is the lists representation. The function for the list's representation is a python built-in that can not be trivially overridden. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't think you'll get it done without defining some new things.