How do I trim whitespace

Question

Is there a Python function that will trim whitespace  spaces and tabs  from a string   Example   t example string t   example string

User · Answer

You can also use very simple  and basic function  str replace    works with the whitespaces and tabs    gt  gt  gt  whitespaces       abcd ef gh ijkl          gt  gt  gt  tabs            abcde       fgh        ijkl    gt  gt  gt  print whitespaces replace          abcdefghijkl  gt  gt  gt  print tabs replace          abcdefghijkl   Simple and easy

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No one has posted these regex solutions yet   Matching    gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  p re compile    s      S    s      gt  gt  gt  m p match     t blah     gt  gt  gt  m group 1   blah    gt  gt  gt  m p match     tbl ah   t     gt  gt  gt  m group 1   bl ah    gt  gt  gt  m p match     t      gt  gt  gt  print m group 1  None   Searching  you have to handle the  only spaces  input case differently     gt  gt  gt  p1 re compile    S    S     gt  gt  gt  m p1 search     tblah   t     gt  gt  gt  m group    blah    gt  gt  gt  m p1 search     tbl ah   t     gt  gt  gt  m group    bl ah    gt  gt  gt  m p1 search     t      gt  gt  gt  m group   Traceback  most recent call last   File   lt stdin gt    line 1  in  lt module gt  AttributeError   NoneType  object has no attribute  group    If you use re sub  you may remove inner whitespace  which could be undesirable

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Having looked at quite a few solutions here with various degrees of understanding  I wondered what to do if the string was comma separated     the problem  While trying to process a csv of contact information  I needed a solution this problem  trim extraneous whitespace and some junk  but preserve trailing commas  and internal whitespace  Working with a field containing notes on the contacts  I wanted to remove the garbage  leaving the good stuff  Trimming out all the punctuation and chaff  I didn t want to lose the whitespace between compound tokens as I didn t want to rebuild later    regex and patterns    s     W   The pattern looks for single instances of any whitespace character and the underscore       from 1 to an unlimited number of times lazily  as few characters as possible  with   s     that come before non-word characters occurring from 1 to an unlimited amount of time with this    W   is equivalent to   a-zA-Z0-9     Specifically  this finds swaths of whitespace  null characters   0   tabs   t   newlines   n   feed-forward   f   carriage returns   r     I see the advantage to this as two-fold     that it doesn t remove whitespace between the complete words tokens that you might want to keep together  Python s built in string method strip  doesn t deal inside the string  just the left and right ends  and default arg is null characters  see below example  several newlines are in the text  and strip   does not remove them all while the regex pattern does   text strip    n t r      This goes beyond the OPs question  but I think there are plenty of cases where we might have odd  pathological instances within the text data  as I did  some how the escape characters ended up in some of the text   Moreover  in list-like strings  we don t want to eliminate the delimiter unless the delimiter separates two whitespace characters or some non-word character  like  -   or  -          NB  Not talking about the delimiter of the CSV itself  Only of instances within the CSV where the data is list-like  ie is a c s  string of substrings    Full disclosure  I ve only been manipulating text for about a month  and regex only the last two weeks  so I m sure there are some nuances I m missing  That said  for smaller collections of strings  mine are in a dataframe of 12 000 rows and 40 odd columns   as a final step after a pass for removal of extraneous characters  this works exceptionally well  especially if you introduce some additional whitespace where you want to separate text joined by a non-word character  but don t want to add whitespace where there was none before    An example    import re   text      portfolio  derp  hello-world  hello-  -world  founders  mentors             gt     ffib  biff  1  12 18 02  12   2013  9874890288                   ff  series a  exit  general mailing  fr         co founder  pitch at palace  ba   slkdjfl bf  sdf jlk       jim somedude blahblah com   dd invites subscribed   master         dd invites subscribed         r     0  ff dd  n invites  subscribed           alumni spring 2012 deck   https  www dropbox com s   n i69rpofhfsp9t7c practice 20ignition - 20june  t n  2134 pdf 2109                                                  n n n nklkjsdf     print f Here is the text as formatted  n text  n   print   print  Trimming both the whitespaces and the non-word characters that follow them    print   trim ws punctn   re compile r   s     W    clean text   trim ws punctn sub      text  print clean text  print   print  what about  strip       print f Here is the text  formatted as is  n text  n   clean text   text strip    n t r      strip out whitespace  print   print f Here is the text  formatted as is  n clean text  n    print   print  Are  text  and  clean text  unchanged    print clean text    text    This outputs    Here is the text as formatted    portfolio  derp  hello-world  hello-  -world  founders  mentors             gt     ffib  biff  1  12 18 02  12   2013  9874890288                   ff  series a  exit  general mailing  fr         co founder  pitch at palace  ba   slkdjfl bf  sdf jlk       jim somedude blahblah com   dd invites subscribed   master         dd invites subscribed         ff dd   invites  subscribed           alumni spring 2012 deck  https  www dropbox com s    i69rpofhfsp9t7c practice 20ignition - 20june    2134 pdf 2109                                                     klkjsdf    using regex to trim both the whitespaces and the non-word characters that follow them    portfolio  derp  hello-world  hello-  world  founders  mentors  ffib  biff  1  12 18 02  12  2013  9874890288  ff  series a  exit  general mailing  fr  co founder  pitch at palace  ba   slkdjfl bf  sdf jlk   jim somedude blahblah com  dd invites subscribed   master  dd invites subscribed  ff dd invites  subscribed  alumni spring 2012 deck  https  www dropbox com s  i69rpofhfsp9t7c practice 20ignition 20june 2134 pdf 2109 klkjsdf   Very nice  What about  strip      Here is the text  formatted as is    portfolio  derp  hello-world  hello-  -world  founders  mentors             gt     ffib  biff  1  12 18 02  12   2013  9874890288                   ff  series a  exit  general mailing  fr         co founder  pitch at palace  ba   slkdjfl bf  sdf jlk       jim somedude blahblah com   dd invites subscribed   master         dd invites subscribed         ff dd   invites  subscribed           alumni spring 2012 deck  https  www dropbox com s    i69rpofhfsp9t7c practice 20ignition - 20june    2134 pdf 2109                                                     klkjsdf    Here is the text  after stipping with  strip      portfolio  derp  hello-world  hello-  -world  founders  mentors             gt     ffib  biff  1  12 18 02  12   2013  9874890288                   ff  series a  exit  general mailing  fr         co founder  pitch at palace  ba   slkdjfl bf  sdf jlk       jim somedude blahblah com   dd invites subscribed   master         dd invites subscribed         ff dd   invites  subscribed           alumni spring 2012 deck  https  www dropbox com s    i69rpofhfsp9t7c practice 20ignition - 20june    2134 pdf 2109                                                     klkjsdf  Are  text  and  clean text  unchanged   True    So strip removes one whitespace from at a time  So in the OPs case  strip   is fine  but if things get any more complex  regex and a similar pattern may be of some value for more general settings   see it in action

User · Answer

This will remove all whitespace and newlines from both the beginning and end of a string    gt  gt  gt  s       n t   n   some  n text  n        gt  gt  gt  re sub    s   s         s   gt  gt  gt   some  n text

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try translate   gt  gt  gt  import string  gt  gt  gt  print   t r n  hello  r n world  t r n     hello   world    gt  gt  gt  tr   string maketrans string whitespace      len string whitespace    gt  gt  gt    t r n  hello  r n world  t r n  translate tr        hello    world       gt  gt  gt    t r n  hello  r n world  t r n  translate tr  replace           helloworld

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something     t  please       t remove   all      n n n nwhitespaces n t         something      join something split      output      please remove all whitespaces    Adding Le Droid s comment to the answer  To separate with a space       something     t  please      t remove  all   extra  n n n nwhitespaces n t        something       join something split      output      please remove all extra whitespaces

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Whitespace includes space  tabs and CRLF  So an elegant and one-liner string function we can use is translate      hello  apple  translate None     n t r    OR if you want to be thorough  import string   hello  apple  translate None  string whitespace

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how to trim a multi line string or a file  s     line one  tline two t line three       line1 starts with a space   2 starts and ends with a tab   3 ends with a space   s1 s splitlines   print s1    line one     tline two t    line three     print  i strip   for i in s1    line one    line two    line three        more details    we could also have used a forloop from the begining  for line in s splitlines        line line strip       process line    we could also be reading a file line by line   e g  my file open filename   or with open filename  as myfile  for line in my file      line line strip       process line    moot point  note splitlines   removed the newline characters  we can keep them by passing True   although split   will then remove them anyway   s2 s splitlines True  print s2    line one n     tline two t n    line three

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For whitespace on both sides use str strip  s    quot    t a string example t   quot  s   s strip    For whitespace on the right side use rstrip  s   s rstrip    For whitespace on the left side lstrip  s   s lstrip    As thedz points out  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 the left-hand side  right-hand side  or 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

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Generally  I am using the following method    gt  gt  gt  myStr    Hi n Stack Over  r flow    gt  gt  gt  charList    u  u005Cn  u  u005Cr  u  u005Ct    gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  for i in charList          myStr   re sub i  r    myStr    gt  gt  gt  myStr  Hi Stack Over  flow    Note  This is only for removing   n     r  and   t  only  It does not remove extra spaces

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Python trim method is called strip   str strip    trim str lstrip    ltrim str rstrip    rtrim

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For leading and trailing whitespace   s       foo     t     print s strip     prints  foo    Otherwise  a regular expression works   import re pat   re compile r  s    s       t  foo    t   bar  t    print pat sub     s    prints  foobar

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re sub            my str replace   n          strip     This will remove all the unwanted spaces and newline characters  Hope this help  import re my str       a     b  n c     formatted str    re sub            my str replace   n          strip     This will result        a   nbsp  nbsp  nbsp  nbsp    b  n c     will be changed to  a b c

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If you want to trim the whitespace off just the beginning and end of the string  you can do something like this   some string        Hello     world  n      new string   some string strip     new string is now  Hello     world     This works a lot like Qt s QString  trimmed   method  in that it removes leading and trailing whitespace  while leaving internal whitespace alone   But if you d like something like Qt s QString  simplified   method which not only removes leading and trailing whitespace  but also  squishes  all consecutive internal whitespace to one space character  you can use a combination of  split   and     join  like this   some string     t    Hello    n t  world  n      new string       join some string split      new string is now  Hello  world     In this last example  each sequence of internal whitespace replaced with a single space  while still trimming the whitespace off the start and end of the string

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If using Python 3  In your print statement  finish with sep     That will separate out all of the spaces    EXAMPLE   txt  potatoes  print  I love   txt    sep       This will print  I love potatoes   Instead of  I love  potatoes    In your case  since you would be trying to get ride of the  t  do sep   t

[python] How do I trim whitespace?

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