Thursday 20 October 2016

string - How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?



I have a text string that starts with a number of spaces, varying between 2 & 4.



What is the simplest way to remove the leading whitespace? (ie. remove everything before a certain character?)



"  Example"   -> "Example"
" Example " -> "Example "
" Example" -> "Example"

Answer



The lstrip() method will remove leading whitespaces, newline and tab characters on a string beginning:



>>> '     hello world!'.lstrip()
'hello world!'


Edit



As balpha pointed out in the comments, in order to remove only spaces from the beginning of the string, lstrip(' ') should be used:



>>> '   hello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'.lstrip(' ')
'\thello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'


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