How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?

Question

I have a text string that starts with a number of spaces, varying between 2 & 4.

What is the simplest way to remove the leading whitespace? (ie. remove everything before a certain character?)

"  Example"   -> "Example"
"  Example  " -> "Example  "
"    Example" -> "Example"

score 395 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 27 '17 at 22:40

395

The lstrip() method will remove leading whitespaces, newline and tab characters on a string beginning:

>>> '     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:

>>> '   hello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'.lstrip(' ')
'\thello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'

Related question:

Trimming a string in Python

edited Sep 27 '17 at 22:40

Stevoisiak

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answered Jun 06 '09 at 07:57

coobird

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Note, though, that lstrip while remove leading *whitespace* which may be more that spaces (tabs etc). That's usually what you want. If you want to remove spaces and spaces only, call " bla".lstrip(" ") – balpha Jun 06 '09 at 08:03
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@balpha: Thanks for point that out! I've added that to the answer. – coobird Jun 06 '09 at 08:08
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been programming for years and did not know this, lifesaver – Chris Hawkes Jan 01 '13 at 19:22
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It might be useful to note for new Python programmers that strings in python are immutable, so if you're working with a string 'string_a', you might think string_a.lstrip() will change the string itself, but in fact you'd need to assign the value of string_a.lstrip() to either itself or a new variable, e.g. "string_a = string_a.lstrip()". – Fields Aug 29 '16 at 13:18
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note: as there is lstrip() there is also strip() and rstrip() – Alexander Stohr Mar 17 '20 at 15:34

score 107 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 13 '12 at 13:59

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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".

edited Jul 13 '12 at 13:59

jamylak

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answered Jun 06 '09 at 07:58

Marquis Wang

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score 27 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 14 '16 at 11:07

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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)

edited Aug 14 '16 at 11:07

andreypopp

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answered Jun 12 '15 at 11:47

Tenzin

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It is worth noting that this _does_ print `'Hello World'` with the middle space intact, for anyone wondering, I guess it has been voted down because the original question was specifically asking to remove _leading_ spaces. – bonapart3 Feb 08 '17 at 15:19
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https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.html Print Is A Function The print statement has been replaced with a print() function, with keyword arguments to replace most of the special syntax of the old print statement (PEP 3105). – mbrandeis Sep 04 '17 at 03:58
@mbrandeis How is that statement relevant here? – MilkyWay90 Dec 04 '18 at 12:20

score 14 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 06 '09 at 08:04

14

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.

answered Jun 06 '09 at 08:04

cjs

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I think the guy asked for the "easiest & simplest way" – Nope Jul 26 '09 at 21:20
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True, but he did also (perhaps inadvertantly) ask for the solution for a more general problem, "ie. remove everything before a certain character?", and this is that more general solution. – cjs Aug 05 '09 at 11:20

score 10 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 12 '19 at 21:46

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:

>>> 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:

>>> import textwrap
>>> print(textwrap.dedent(s))
this has 4 leading spaces 1
this has 4 leading spaces 2
this has 4 leading spaces 3

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 11 '21 at 21:35

My personal favorite for any string handling is strip, split and join (in that order):

>>> ' '.join("   this is my  badly spaced     string   ! ".strip().split())
'this is my badly spaced string !'

In general it can be good to apply this for all string handling.

This does the following:

First it strips - this removes leading and ending spaces.
Then it splits - it does this on whitespace by default (so it'll even get tabs and newlines). The thing is that this returns a list.
Finally join iterates over the list and joins each with a single space in between.

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered May 25 '21 at 06:53

Using regular expressions when cleaning the text is the best practice

def removing_leading_whitespaces(text):
     return re.sub(r"^\s+","",text)

Apply the above function

removing_leading_whitespaces("  Example")
"  Example"   -> "Example"

removing_leading_whitespaces("  Example  ")
"  Example  " -> "Example  "

removing_leading_whitespaces("    Example")
"    Example" -> "Example"

How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?

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