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I have a text string that starts with a number of spaces, varying between 2 & 4.
What is the simplest way to remove the leading whitespace? (ie. remove everything before a certain character?)
" Example" -> "Example"
" Example " -> "Example "
" Example" -> "Example"
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How do I trim whitespace from a string?
5 answers
How do I remove leading and trailing whitespace from a string in Python?
For example:
" Hello " --> "Hello"
" Hello" --> "Hello"
"Hello " --> "Hello"
"Bob has a cat" --> "Bob has a cat"
Answer #1
Just one space or all consecutive spaces? If the second, then strings already have a .strip() method:
>>> " Hello ".strip()
"Hello"
>>> " Hello".strip()
"Hello"
>>> "Bob has a cat".strip()
"Bob has a cat"
>>> " Hello ".strip() # ALL consecutive spaces at both ends removed
"Hello"
If you only need to remove one space however, you could do it with:
def strip_one_space(s):
if s.endswith(" "): s = s[:-1]
if s.startswith(" "): s = s[1:]
return s
>>> strip_one_space(" Hello ")
" Hello"
Also, note that str.strip() removes other whitespace characters as well (e.g. tabs and newlines). To remove only spaces, you can specify the character to remove as an argument to strip, i.e.:
>>> " Hello
".strip(" ")
"Hello
"
Answer #2
As pointed out in answers above
my_string.strip()
will remove all the leading and trailing whitespace characters such as
,
, , f, space .
For more flexibility use the following
- Removes only leading whitespace chars:
my_string.lstrip() - Removes only trailing whitespace chars:
my_string.rstrip() - Removes specific whitespace chars:
my_string.strip(" ")ormy_string.lstrip(" ")ormy_string.rstrip(" ")and so on.
More details are available in the docs.
How do I trim whitespace?
5 answers
Is there a Python function that will trim whitespace (spaces and tabs) from a string?
Example: example string ‚Üí example string
Answer #1
For whitespace on both sides use str.strip:
s = " a string example "
s = s.strip()
For whitespace on the right side use rstrip:
s = s.rstrip()
For whitespace on the left side lstrip:
s = s.lstrip()
As thedz points out, you can provide an argument to strip arbitrary characters to any of these functions like this:
s = s.strip("
")
This will strip any space, ,
, or
characters from the left-hand side, right-hand side, or both sides of the string.
The examples above only remove strings from the left-hand and right-hand sides of strings. If you want to also remove characters from the middle of a string, try re.sub:
import re
print(re.sub("[s+]", "", s))
That should print out:
astringexample
