Sometimes you want to do more than trimming, let's say you want to remove chars inside the string.
How to Remove Multiple Spaces Inside a String This sequence of chars is a combination of all chars you want to remove from the beginning and end of your string. > s = "\t\t\t hello world \t" > sĪnd that's it! How to Trim a Combination of Characters From a StringĪs I mentioned before, str.strip takes as argument a string, not just a single char. Trimming tabs from a string in Python is the same as other characters, you use str.strip and pass the '\t' string to it. If you are following this guide from the beginning you might already know how to do this. You feed str.strip with \r\n and method does its job! > s = " hello world\r\n\r\n" > print(s) Removing them from a string is the same as removing the single newline. This is how Microsoft Windows, Symbian OS and other non-Unix operating systems represent a new line. They are represented by the concatenation of \r and \n forming \r\n. The Carriage Return ( CR), and Line Feed ( LF) are nothing more than a newline character. To trim line breaks, you can pass \n and it will strip all newlines from both sides of the string. I've also mentioned that this method takes a chars argument that you can use pass a combination of character you want to trim. We've seen how str.strip can remove blank spaces from both sides of a string. 'hello' # but you can also strip other character > '***hello***'.strip( '*') # by default, strip removes whitespaces > ' hello '.strip() ⚠️ WARNING ⚠️: A common misconception is to think that there's a trim() function in Python. And just like str.lstrip and str.rstrip, if you can pass any combination of chars as argument, it removes them from both ends. This method trims both sides of the string. If all you want is to remove whitespaces from start and end of string, str.strip will serve you better. '' Removing Spaces From From Start and End of a String
> def strip_last( s: str, ch: str = ' ') -> str: if s and s = ch: Check if the last char is a space, and use slice to remove it. And we can use the same logic from the previous example. Sometimes you might want to trim only the last character of a string. By default, str.rstrip() removes blanks if you don't pass anything to it. It removes all chars that match one of those you passed, and stop as soon as it cannot match anymore. This method expects a list of chars and trims the string from the right. The way to remove trailing spaces from the end of the string is to use str.rstrip. ' hello' Stripping Trailing Whitespace From End of a String > def strip_first( s: str, ch: str = ' ') -> str: if s and s = ch: If there's no guarantee of that, we'll need to check first if the string starts with space. If that's the case, then you can just slice it. The first one assumes that there will always be at least one whitespace in the beginning of the string. But if all you want is to strip the first char, then there are two ways of doing this. When calling str.lstrip with no arguments, it removes all whitespaces from left to right. The str class has a very convenient method to trim leading spaces named str.lstrip, a shorthand for "left-strip", since it trims a string from the left-hand side. Stripping Leading Whitespace From Beginning of a String In this section, we're going to see how to remove leading or trailing spaces, blank spaces, newline character, carriage return (CRLF), and tabs. You can remove any kind o character, but usually what we're interested in is deleting blank spaces, new lines, carriage return (CRLF), tabs and other special symbols. Removing unwanted chars makes it easier to compare strings and can prevent hard to debug issues.
Trimming a string means deleting certain chars from the start, the end, or both sides of a string.
And we'll be using nothing more than native methods and regex-no external libraries required!īy the end of this article, you'll have mastered:īy stripping leading whitespace from the beginningīy stripping trailing whitespace from the endīy removing spaces the start and end of a string You'll also learn how to remove tabs, newlines, carriage return (CRLF), and other characters. In this article, you'll see only the most important techniques, such as stripping leading and trailing spaces (as well as the ones inside the string). the truth is, you don't need to know every one of them. There are multiple ways you can trim a string in Python.īut.