How to remove leading and trailing spaces from a string?

I'm having a hard time trying to use .strip with the following line of code:

f.write(re.split("Tech ID:|Name:|Account #:",line)[-1])

4 Answers

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.

Expand your one liner into multiple lines. Then it becomes easy:

f.write(re.split("Tech ID:|Name:|Account #:",line)[-1])
parts = re.split("Tech ID:|Name:|Account #:",line)
wanted_part = parts[-1]
wanted_part_stripped = wanted_part.strip()
f.write(wanted_part_stripped)

Should be noted that strip() method would trim any leading and trailing whitespace characters from the string (if there is no passed-in argument). If you want to trim space character(s), while keeping the others (like newline), this answer might be helpful:

sample = ' some string\n'
sample_modified = sample.strip(' ')
print(sample_modified) # will print 'some string\n'

strip([chars]): You can pass in optional characters to strip([chars]) method. Python will look for occurrences of these characters and trim the given string accordingly.

Starting file:

 line 1 line 2
line 3 line 4 

Code:

with open("filename.txt", "r") as f: lines = f.readlines() for line in lines: stripped = line.strip() print(stripped)

Output:

line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4