Removing new lines only at the beginning of a string

Question

I've tried

if string[0] == "\n":
    string = string[1:]

I don't think strip() and rtrim() is what I want because they'd either remove all occurrences of \n or only at the end of the string.

Answer 1

You can use re.sub:

import re
string = "\n\nHello"
new_string = re.sub("\n+", '', string)

Output:

'Hello'

This will work for any number of \n at the beginning of a string.

Answer 2

You want str.lstrip(). Exact same as strip() except it strips from the left only, not both directions.

>>> s = '\n\nhi\n'
>>> s.lstrip('\n')
'hi\n'

Answer 3

Duplicate of How do I trim whitespace with Python?

But basically: string = string.lstrip('\n')