Python provides three methods that can be used to trim whitespaces from the string object.
Python Trim String
- strip(): returns a new string after removing any leading and trailing whitespaces including tabs (\t).
- rstrip(): returns a new string with trailing whitespace removed. It’s easier to remember as removing white spaces from “right” side of the string.
- lstrip(): returns a new string with leading whitespace removed, or removing whitespaces from the “left” side of the string.
All of these methods don’t accept any arguments to remove whitespaces. If a character argument is provided, then they will remove that characters from the string from leading and trailing places.
Let’s look at a simple example of trimming whitespaces from the string in Python.
s1 = ' abc '
print(f'String =\'{s1}\'')
print(f'After Removing Leading Whitespaces String =\'{s1.lstrip()}\'')
print(f'After Removing Trailing Whitespaces String =\'{s1.rstrip()}\'')
print(f'After Trimming Whitespaces String =\'{s1.strip()}\'')
Output:
String =' abc '
After Removing Leading Whitespaces String ='abc '
After Removing Trailing Whitespaces String =' abc'
After Trimming Whitespaces String ='abc'
Let’s look at some more examples with strings having a new-line and tabs.
>>> s1 = ' X\n Y \nZ \t'
>>> s1.strip()
'X\n Y \nZ'
>>> s1.rstrip()
' X\n Y \nZ'
>>> s1.lstrip()
'X\n Y \nZ \t'
You can checkout more Python string examples from our GitHub Repository.
Thank you very much for these examples.
I was trying to understand the differences and your explanation was very easy to understand.
I’ll check out more of your pages.
Is there a stock Python function that removed redundant spaces?
For example:
“Hello world”
becomes
“Hello Word”
hello world and hello word not the same but no extra space