python - How do I trim whitespace from a string?

How do I remove leading and trailing whitespace from a string in Python?

For example:

" Hello " --> "Hello"
" Hello"  --> "Hello"
"Hello "  --> "Hello"
"Bob has a cat" --> "Bob has a cat"

Answer

Just one space, or all consecutive spaces? If the second, then strings already have a .strip() method:

>>> ' 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'

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'

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.:

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