Python – How to Remove Leading Whitespace

pythonstringtrimwhitespace

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"

Best Answer

The lstrip() method will remove leading whitespaces, newline and tab characters on a string beginning:

>>> '     hello world!'.lstrip()
'hello world!'

Edit

As balpha pointed out in the comments, in order to remove only spaces from the beginning of the string, lstrip(' ') should be used:

>>> '   hello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'.lstrip(' ')
'\thello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'

Related Solutions

Python String – How to Trim Whitespace from a String

To remove all whitespace surrounding a string, use .strip(). Examples:

>>> ' 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'

Note that str.strip() removes all whitespace characters, including tabs and newlines. To remove only spaces, specify the specific character to remove as an argument to strip:

>>> "  Hello\n  ".strip(" ")
'Hello\n'

To remove only one space at most:

def strip_one_space(s):
    if s.endswith(" "): s = s[:-1]
    if s.startswith(" "): s = s[1:]
    return s

>>> strip_one_space("   Hello ")
'  Hello'

Python – How to Trim Whitespace from a String

For whitespace on both sides, use str.strip:

s = "  \t a string example\t  "
s = s.strip()

For whitespace on the right side, use str.rstrip:

s = s.rstrip()

For whitespace on the left side, use str.lstrip:

s = s.lstrip()

You can provide an argument to strip arbitrary characters to any of these functions, like this:

s = s.strip(' \t\n\r')

This will strip any space, \t, \n, or \r characters from 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

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Python String – How to Trim Whitespace from a String

Python – How to Trim Whitespace from a String

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