How can I remove extra whitespace from strings whe

Question

I have the following file named 'data.csv':

    1997,Ford,E350
    1997, Ford , E350
    1997,Ford,E350,"Super, luxurious truck"
    1997,Ford,E350,"Super ""luxurious"" truck"
    1997,Ford,E350," Super luxurious truck "
    "1997",Ford,E350
    1997,Ford,E350
    2000,Mercury,Cougar

And I would like to parse it into a pandas DataFrame so that the DataFrame looks as follows:

       Year     Make   Model              Description
    0  1997     Ford    E350                     None
    1  1997     Ford    E350                     None
    2  1997     Ford    E350   Super, luxurious truck
    3  1997     Ford    E350  Super "luxurious" truck
    4  1997     Ford    E350    Super luxurious truck
    5  1997     Ford    E350                     None
    6  1997     Ford    E350                     None
    7  2000  Mercury  Cougar                     None

The best I could do was:

    pd.read_table("data.csv", sep=r',', names=["Year", "Make", "Model", "Description"])

Which gets me:

    Year     Make   Model              Description
 0  1997     Ford    E350                     None
 1  1997    Ford     E350                     None
 2  1997     Ford    E350   Super, luxurious truck
 3  1997     Ford    E350  Super "luxurious" truck
 4  1997     Ford    E350   Super luxurious truck 
 5  1997     Ford    E350                     None
 6  1997     Ford    E350                     None
 7  2000  Mercury  Cougar                     None

How can I get the DataFrame without those whitespaces?

Answer 1

Adding parameter skipinitialspace=True to read_table worked for me.

So try:

pd.read_table("data.csv", 
              sep=r',', 
              names=["Year", "Make", "Model", "Description"], 
              skipinitialspace=True)

Same thing works in pd.read_csv().