In this tutorial, you will learn various methods to remove whitespace from a string in Python. Whitespace characters include spaces, tabs, newlines, and carriage returns, which can often be unwanted in strings when processing text data.
Python strings are immutable, meaning their values cannot be changed after they are created. Therefore, any method that manipulates a string will return a new string with the desired modifications. This tutorial will cover different techniques, including built-in string methods and regular expressions, to effectively remove whitespace from your strings.
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The examples in this tutorial use the Python interactive console in the command line to demonstrate different methods that remove spaces. The examples use the following string:
The output is:
This string has different types of whitespace and newline characters, such as space (``), tab (\t
), newline (\n
), and carriage return (\r
).
strip()
MethodThe Python String strip()
method removes leading and trailing characters from a string. The default character to remove is space.
Declare the string variable:
Use the strip()
method to remove the leading and trailing whitespace:
The output is:
If you want to remove only the leading spaces or trailing spaces, then you can use the lstrip()
and rstrip()
methods.
replace()
MethodYou can use the replace()
method to remove all the whitespace characters from the string, including from between words.
Declare the string variable:
Use the replace()
method to replace spaces with an empty string:
The output is:
join()
and split()
MethodsYou can remove all of the duplicate whitespace and newline characters by using the join()
method with the split()
method. In this example, the split()
method breaks up the string into a list, using the default separator of any whitespace character. Then, the join()
method joins the list back into one string with a single space (" "
) between each word.
Declare the string variable:
Use the join()
and split()
methods together to remove duplicate spaces and newline characters:
The output is:
translate()
MethodYou can remove all of the whitespace and newline characters using the translate()
method. The translate()
method replaces specified characters with characters defined in a dictionary or mapping table. The following example uses a custom dictionary with the string.whitespace
string constant, which contains all the whitespace characters. The custom dictionary {ord(c): None for c in string.whitespace}
replaces all the characters in string.whitespace
with None
.
Import the string
module so that you can use string.whitespace
:
Declare the string variable:
Use the translate()
method to remove all whitespace characters:
The output is:
You can also use a regular expression to match whitespace characters and remove them using the re.sub()
function.
This example uses the following file, regexspaces.py
, to show some ways you can use regex to remove whitespace characters:
Run the file from the command line:
You get the following output:
In this tutorial, you learned various methods to remove whitespace characters from strings in Python. These methods include using the strip()
, replace()
, join()
and split()
, translate()
, and regular expressions. Each method has its own use case and can be chosen based on the specific requirements of your task.
To further enhance your understanding of string manipulation in Python, you can refer the following tutorials:
strip()
, lstrip()
, and rstrip()
methods.By using these resources, you can deepen your knowledge and become more proficient in handling strings in Python.
There are several ways, depending on which spaces you want to remove:
replace()
:strip()
:To remove all spaces, use my_string.replace(" ", "")
. To remove only leading and trailing spaces, use my_string.strip()
.
strip()
do in Python?The strip()
method returns a new string by removing all leading (at the start) and trailing (at the end) whitespace characters. For example:
To “trim” spaces—meaning to remove them only from the start and end of the string—use the strip()
method:
“Stripping whitespace” refers to removing any leading and trailing whitespace characters (including spaces, tabs, and newlines) from a string. The strip()
, lstrip()
, and rstrip()
methods are commonly used for this purpose.
To remove a known substring from a string, you can use replace()
:
If you need to remove content by index, you can use slicing:
The strip()
method is used to remove whitespace from the start and end of a string. For removing whitespace from the entire string, replace()
can be used, and for more sophisticated patterns, you can use regular expressions via the re
module.
When using print()
with multiple arguments, Python adds a space by default. To avoid this, you can specify the sep parameter:
If your string already contains spaces you want to remove, apply .replace(" ", "")
or strip()
before printing:
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I don’t see anymore the date things were published. Why is it removed? Regards
- Valentino
You really need to point out that the functions create and return a new string, they do not change the original. Yes, strings being immutable is a foundational Python concept but someone who’s looking for this level of help is probably very new to Python. It can be incredibly frustrating for a beginner to find a page like this and do: s = " My string with leading/trailing spaces ’ s.strip() print(s) What the heck? It doesn’t work!
- DJ
Thanks for the feedback, I have included one-liner to point this out.
- Pankaj
s = ‘your string’ s = s.strip () print (s) This will work
- NSK…NGU
Use the replace. The strip() not work! Code: string=‘Hello world’ string=string.replace(" “,”") print(string)
- Skata
Thank you sir, it was very helpful for me.🙏
- Sarthak Dandgawhal
let me explain you with an simple example s= (" PYTHON “) #so here i am using both and leading and trailing spaces output= s.strip(” “) # in between double quotes i am using space as i have used space before and after PYTHON print(output) # you will get output as “PYTHON” … another example while using idle --------------------------------------- >>> s= (” python ") >>> s.strip() ‘python’ >>> see both the trailing and leading spaces have been removed
- DEEPAK
nvm figured it out, thanks
- pegel
This was so helpful! Thanks for putting this together! :)
- Azmain Nisak
the replace function helped me where i was thinking of a more complex solution. So thank you
- Munir
greeting= “Hello” user= “Guy” message= “welcome to the thunderdome Friend” print(greeting.upper(), user.capitalize(), message.strip( ).lower() ) ive also tried print(greeting.upper(), user.capitalize(), message.replace(" ", " ").lower() ) goal is to lowercase friend and get rid of white space. when I run the .py file through cmd it just returns HELLO Guy welcome to the thunderdome friend no matter what I seem to try
- Pegel
You’re using **greeting.upper()** str.upper()- method returns all strings capitalized. Plus why use **user.capitalize()**str.capitalize()-method returns first letter of string in upper case. which you seem to have already done. Refer to docs for detailed description on string methods https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods
- Chidhvilas
Very helpful article, Pankaj. Thank you for this
- ypll
hey nice one thank you helped me in my code
- Moulya
Thank you so much.
- Sai Vinay Palakodeti