String strip in Python

Question

While learning about python  I came upon this code  which takes a text file  splits each line into an array  and inserts it into a custom dictionary  where the array 0  is the key and array 1  is the value   my dict       infile   open  file txt   for line in infile       line   line strip         parts    p strip   for p in line split   t        parts    p for p in line split   t        my dict parts 0     parts 1      print line  for key in my dict      print  key      key     t     value     my dict key    I ran the program with the commented lines off and on and I got the same result   of course replacing the second commented line with the line below it  It seems to me that doing a strip   is optional  Is it better practice to leave it in

User · Accepted Answer

If you can comment out code and your program still works, then yes, that code was optional.

.strip() with no arguments (or None as the first argument) removes all whitespace at the start and end, including spaces, tabs, newlines and carriage returns. Leaving it in doesn't do any harm, and allows your program to deal with unexpected extra whitespace inserted into the file.

For example, by using .strip(), the following two lines in a file would lead to the same end result:

 foo\tbar \n
foo\tbar\n

I'd say leave it in.

User · Answer

No  it is better practice to leave them out   Without strip    you can have empty keys and values   apples lt tab gt round  fruity things oranges lt tab gt round  fruity things bananas lt tab gt    Without strip    bananas is present in the dictionary but with an empty string as value  With strip    this code will throw an exception because it strips the tab of the banana line

User · Answer

strip does nothing but  removes the the whitespace in your string  If you want to remove the extra whitepace from front and back of your string  you can use strip   The example string which can illustrate that is this   In  2   x    something  t like      t this  In  4   x split   t   Out 4     something      like          this     See  even after splitting with  t there is extra whitespace in first and second items which can be removed using strip in your code

User · Answer

strip removes the whitespace from the beginning and end of the string  If you want the whitespace  don t call strip

User · Answer

In this case  you might get some differences   Consider a line like    foo tbar     In this case  if you strip  then you ll get   foo   bar   as the dictionary entry   If you don t strip  you ll get   foo   bar     note the extra space at the end   Note that if you use line split   instead of line split   t    you ll split on every whitespace character and the  striping  will be done during splitting automatically   In other words   line strip   split     is always identical to   line split     but   line strip   split delimiter    Is not necessarily equivalent to   line split delimiter

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