How python trim works

Question

How to remove whitespaces from a string?

Answer 1

It depends on one such space or all spaces. If the second, then strings already have a .strip() method:

>>> ' Welcome '.strip()
'Welcome'
>>> ' Welcome'.strip()
'Welcome'

>>> ' Welcome '.strip() # ALL spaces at ends removed
'Hello'

If you need only 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(" Welcome ")
' 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.:

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

Answer 2

>>> ' Hello '.strip()
'Hello'
>>> ' Hello'.strip()
'Hello'

Answer 3

If you need only 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'

Answer 4

strip is not limited to whitespace characters either:

# remove all leading/trailing commas, periods and hyphens
title = title.strip(',.-')

Answer 5

You want strip():

myphrases = [ " Hello ", " Hello", "Hello ", "Bob has a cat" ]

for phrase in myphrases:
    print phrase.strip()

Answer 6

You can use .strip() function to trim the whitespace from your text.