It is very common to find whitespace at the beginning, the end, or the inside of a string, whether it's data in a CSV file or data from another source. Use the following recipe to create a custom function to remove the whitespace from every row of a column in a Pandas DataFrame.
Continue using the customers DataFrame you created earlier, or import the file into a new DataFrame.
def remove_whitespace(x): """ Helper function to remove any blank space from a string x: a string """ try: # Remove spaces inside of the string x = "".join(x.split()) except: pass return x customers.last_name = customers.last_name.apply(remove_whitespace)