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

Answer 1

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"

Answer 2

#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 ']

Answer 3

for removing whitespaces from the middle of the string

$p = "ATGCGAC ACGATCGACC";
$p =~ s/\s//g;
print $p;

output: ATGCGACACGATCGACC

Answer 4

You can also use very simple, and basic function: str.replace(), works with the whitespaces and tabs:

>>> whitespaces = "   abcd ef gh ijkl       "
>>> tabs = "        abcde       fgh        ijkl"

>>> print whitespaces.replace(" ", "")
abcdefghijkl
>>> print tabs.replace(" ", "")
abcdefghijkl

Simple and easy.

Answer 5

try translate

>>> import string
>>> print '\t\r\n  hello \r\n world \t\r\n'

  hello 
 world  
>>> tr = string.maketrans(string.whitespace, ' '*len(string.whitespace))
>>> '\t\r\n  hello \r\n world \t\r\n'.translate(tr)
'     hello    world    '
>>> '\t\r\n  hello \r\n world \t\r\n'.translate(tr).replace(' ', '')
'helloworld'

Answer 6

Generally, I am using the following method:

>>> myStr = "Hi\n Stack Over \r flow!"
>>> charList = [u"\u005Cn",u"\u005Cr",u"\u005Ct"]
>>> import re
>>> for i in charList:
        myStr = re.sub(i, r"", myStr)

>>> myStr
'Hi Stack Over  flow'

Note: This is only for removing "\n", "\r" and "\t" only. It does not remove extra spaces.