How to Remove Leading Whitespace in Python

How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?

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!'

Related question:

• Trimming a string in Python

How to remove leading and trailing spaces from a string?

You can use the strip() method to remove trailing and leading spaces:

>>> s = '   abd cde   '
>>> s.strip()
'abd cde'

Note: the internal spaces are preserved.

Remove white spaces from the beginning of each string in a list

Use str.lstrip in a list comprehension:

my_list = [' a', ' b', ' c']

my_list = [i.lstrip() for i in my_list]
print(my_list)  # ['a', 'b', 'c']

Remove all whitespace in a string

If you want to remove leading and ending spaces, use str.strip():

>>> "  hello  apple  ".strip()
'hello  apple'

If you want to remove all space characters, use str.replace() (NB this only removes the “normal” ASCII space character ' ' U+0020 but not any other whitespace):

>>> "  hello  apple  ".replace(" ", "")
'helloapple'

If you want to remove duplicated spaces, use str.split() followed by str.join():

>>> " ".join("  hello  apple  ".split())
'hello apple'

Regular Expression - Python - Remove Leading Whitespace

You could use strip() to remove leading and trailing whitespaces:

In [1]: ' 56.00  '.strip()
Out[1]: '56.00'

How to remove leading and trailing whitespace from each line in an MD file while preserving empty lines?

You could split on the line break character - '\n' and rejoin all the entries with the leading and trailing spaces stripped -

print(repr(markdown))
#' ## This is a headline\n\n [1] This is the first paragraph\n \n [2] This is the second paragraph\n \n   \n   a. This is the third paragraph;  \n   b. This is the fourth paragraph.'

clean_markdown = '\n'.join(_.strip() for _ in markdown.split('\n'))

print(repr(clean_markdown))
#'## This is a headline\n\n[1] This is the first paragraph\n\n[2] This is the second paragraph\n\n\na. This is the third paragraph;\nb. This is the fourth paragraph.'

And write this clean_markdown to your file

How do I trim whitespace?

For whitespace on both sides, use str.strip:

s = "  \t a string example\t  "
s = s.strip()

For whitespace on the right side, use str.rstrip:

s = s.rstrip()

For whitespace on the left side, use str.lstrip:

s = s.lstrip()

You can provide an argument to strip arbitrary characters to any of these functions, like this:

s = s.strip(' \t\n\r')

This will strip any space, \t, \n, or \r characters from both sides of the string.

The examples above only remove strings from the left-hand and right-hand sides of strings. If you want to also remove characters from the middle of a string, try re.sub:

import re
print(re.sub('[\s+]', '', s))

That should print out:

astringexample

How do I remove trailing and leading white space from items in a list in Python?

You can use the .strip function in python. Using it in list comprehension.

my_list = [x.strip() for x in my_list]

Hope this helps.

---

Related Topics