How do I remove leading whitespace in Python

Question

I have a text string that starts with a number of spaces  varying between 2  amp  4   What is the simplest way to remove the leading whitespace   ie  remove everything before a certain character       Example    - gt   Example     Example    - gt   Example         Example  - gt   Example

User · Answer

The function strip will remove whitespace from the beginning and end of a string   my str       text   my str   my str strip     will set my str to  text

User · Answer

If you want to cut the whitespaces before and behind the word  but keep the middle ones   You could use    word      Hello World    stripped   word strip   print stripped

User · Answer

To remove everything before a certain character  use a regular expression   re sub r    a           to remove everything up to the first  a     a  can be replaced with any character class you like  such as word characters

User · Answer

The question doesn t address multiline strings  but here is how you would strip leading whitespace from a multiline string using python s standard library textwrap module  If we had a string like   s           line 1 has 4 leading spaces     line 2 has 4 leading spaces     line 3 has 4 leading spaces       if we print s  we would get output like    gt  gt  gt  print s      this has 4 leading spaces 1     this has 4 leading spaces 2     this has 4 leading spaces 3   and if we used textwrap dedent    gt  gt  gt  import textwrap  gt  gt  gt  print textwrap dedent s   this has 4 leading spaces 1 this has 4 leading spaces 2 this has 4 leading spaces 3

User · Answer

The lstrip   method will remove leading whitespaces  newline and tab characters on a string beginning    gt  gt  gt        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    gt  gt  gt      hello world with 2 spaces and a tab   lstrip        thello world with 2 spaces and a tab     Related question    Trimming a string in Python

[python] How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?

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