Python Trim String – rstrip(), lstrip(), strip()

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'