🧹 Removing Whitespace

Whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, newlines) often need to be cleaned up in strings. Python provides several methods to handle this common task efficiently.

# Basic whitespace removal
text = "  Hello World  "
cleaned = text.strip()
print(f"Original: '{text}'")
print(f"Cleaned: '{cleaned}'")

🎯 Whitespace Removal Methods

Python offers three main methods for whitespace removal, each with a specific purpose.

Basic Examples

# Different ways to remove whitespace
text = "  Python is fun  "

# Remove from both sides
both_cleaned = text.strip()
print(f"Both sides: '{both_cleaned}'")

# Remove from left only
left_cleaned = text.lstrip()
print(f"Left side: '{left_cleaned}'")

# Remove from right only
right_cleaned = text.rstrip()
print(f"Right side: '{right_cleaned}'")

🔍 Custom Character Removal

You can also remove specific characters, not just whitespace.

# Remove specific characters
text = "...Hello World..."
cleaned = text.strip(".")
print(f"Original: '{text}'")
print(f"Cleaned: '{cleaned}'")

# Remove multiple characters
text = "***Python***"
cleaned = text.strip("*")
print(f"Original: '{text}'")
print(f"Cleaned: '{cleaned}'")

🎨 Common Use Cases

Here are some practical examples of whitespace removal in real-world scenarios.

# 1. Cleaning user input
user_input = "  john.doe@email.com  "
email = user_input.strip()
print(f"Cleaned email: '{email}'")

# 2. Processing file content
file_content = "  First line  \n  Second line  \n"
cleaned_lines = [line.strip() for line in file_content.split("\n")]
print("Cleaned lines:", cleaned_lines)

# 3. Formatting text
text = "  Python Programming  "
formatted = text.strip().title()
print(f"Formatted: '{formatted}'")

📝 Quick Practice

Let's practice cleaning up some messy text!

Hands-on Exercise

Clean up a string containing extra spaces and newlines.

python

# Whitespace Practice
messy_text = """
  Python is
  a great language
  for beginners
"""

# TODO: Clean up the text
# 1. Remove extra spaces
# 2. Remove newlines
# 3. Make it a single line

# Print the result
print(f"Cleaned text: '{cleaned_text}'")

Solution and Explanation 💡

Click to see the solution

# Whitespace Practice Solution
messy_text = """
  Python is
  a great language
  for beginners
"""

# Clean up the text
cleaned_text = " ".join(line.strip() for line in messy_text.split("\n") if line.strip())

print(f"Cleaned text: '{cleaned_text}'")

Key Learning Points:

📌 Used .split("\n") to break into lines
📌 Used .strip() to clean each line
📌 Used list comprehension to filter empty lines
📌 Used " ".join() to combine into one line

🎯 Key Takeaways

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