Credit: Luther Blissett
You need to work on a string without regard for any extra leading or trailing spaces a user may have typed.
That’s what the
lstrip
,
rstrip
, and
strip
methods of string objects are for. Each
takes no argument and returns the starting string, shorn of
whitespace on either or both sides:
>>> x = ' hej '
>>> print '|', x.lstrip(), '|', x.rstrip(), '|', x.strip( ), '|'
| hej | hej | hej |
Just as you may need to add space to either end of a string to align that string left, right, or center in a field of fixed width, so may you need to remove all whitespace (blanks, tabs, newlines, etc.) from either or both ends. Because this is a frequent need, Python string objects supply this functionality through their methods.