How do I trim whitespace?

Is there a Python function that will trim whitespace (spaces and tabs) from a string?

"  \t example string\t  "   →   "example string"

For whitespace on both sides, use str.strip:

s = "  \t a string example\t  "
s = s.strip()

For whitespace on the right side, use str.rstrip:

s = s.rstrip()

For whitespace on the left side, use str.lstrip:

s = s.lstrip()

As thedz points out, you can provide an argument to strip arbitrary characters to any of these functions like this:

s = s.strip(' \t\n\r')

This will strip any space, \t, \n, or \r characters from the left-hand side, right-hand side, or both sides of the string.

The examples above only remove strings from the left-hand and right-hand sides of strings. If you want to also remove characters from the middle of a string, try re.sub:

import re
print(re.sub('[\s+]', '', s))

That should print out:

astringexample