Python – How to Remove White Spaces from a String

pythonpython-2.7python-3.xstringwhitespace

I need to remove spaces from a string in python. For example.

str1 = "TN 81 NZ 0025"

str1sp = nospace(srt1)

print(str1sp)

>>>TN81NZ0025

Best Answer

Use str.replace:

>>> s = "TN 81 NZ 0025"
>>> s.replace(" ", "")
'TN81NZ0025'

To remove all types of white-space characters use str.translate:

>>> from string import whitespace
>>> s = "TN 81   NZ\t\t0025\nfoo"
# Python 2
>>> s.translate(None, whitespace)
'TN81NZ0025foo'
# Python 3
>>> s.translate(dict.fromkeys(map(ord, whitespace)))
'TN81NZ0025foo'

Related Solutions

Python – How to Remove Whitespace from the End of a String

>>> "    xyz     ".rstrip()
'    xyz'

There is more about rstrip in the documentation.

Python – How to Strip All Whitespace from String

Taking advantage of str.split's behavior with no sep parameter:

>>> s = " \t foo \n bar "
>>> "".join(s.split())
'foobar'

If you just want to remove spaces instead of all whitespace:

>>> s.replace(" ", "")
'\tfoo\nbar'

Premature optimization

Even though efficiency isn't the primary goal—writing clear code is—here are some initial timings:

$ python -m timeit '"".join(" \t foo \n bar ".split())'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.38 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s 'import re' 're.sub(r"\s+", "", " \t foo \n bar ")'
100000 loops, best of 3: 15.6 usec per loop

Note the regex is cached, so it's not as slow as you'd imagine. Compiling it beforehand helps some, but would only matter in practice if you call this many times:

$ python -m timeit -s 'import re; e = re.compile(r"\s+")' 'e.sub("", " \t foo \n bar ")'
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.76 usec per loop

Even though re.sub is 11.3x slower, remember your bottlenecks are assuredly elsewhere. Most programs would not notice the difference between any of these 3 choices.

Best Answer

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Python – How to Remove Whitespace from the End of a String

Python – How to Strip All Whitespace from String

Premature optimization

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