How do I trim whitespace from a string?

Question

Just one space or all consecutive spaces? If the second, then strings already have a .strip() method:

>>> ' Hello '.strip()
'Hello'
>>> ' Hello'.strip()
'Hello'
>>> 'Bob has a cat'.strip()
'Bob has a cat'
>>> '   Hello   '.strip()  # ALL consecutive spaces at both ends removed
'Hello'

If you only need to remove one space however, you could do it with:

def strip_one_space(s):
    if s.endswith(" "): s = s[:-1]
    if s.startswith(" "): s = s[1:]
    return s

>>> strip_one_space("   Hello ")
'  Hello'

Also, note that str.strip() removes other whitespace characters as well (e.g. tabs and newlines). To remove only spaces, you can specify the character to remove as an argument to strip, i.e.:

>>> "  Hello\n".strip(" ")
'Hello\n'

As pointed out in answers above

my_string.strip()

will remove all the leading and trailing whitespace characters such as \n, \r, \t, \f, space .

For more flexibility use the following

• Removes only leading whitespace chars: my_string.lstrip()
• Removes only trailing whitespace chars: my_string.rstrip()
• Removes specific whitespace chars: my_string.strip('\n') or my_string.lstrip('\n\r') or my_string.rstrip('\n\t') and so on.

More details are available in the docs.

strip is not limited to whitespace characters either:

# remove all leading/trailing commas, periods and hyphens
title = title.strip(',.-')

This will remove all leading and trailing whitespace in myString:

myString.strip()

You want strip():

myphrases = [" Hello ", " Hello", "Hello ", "Bob has a cat"]

for phrase in myphrases:
    print(phrase.strip())

This can also be done with a regular expression

import re

input  = " Hello "
output = re.sub(r'^\s+|\s+$', '', input)
# output = 'Hello'

Well seeing this thread as a beginner got my head spinning. Hence came up with a simple shortcut.

Though str.strip() works to remove leading & trailing spaces it does nothing for spaces between characters.

words=input("Enter the word to test")
# If I have a user enter discontinous threads it becomes a problem
# input = "   he llo, ho w are y ou  "
n=words.strip()
print(n)
# output "he llo, ho w are y ou" - only leading & trailing spaces are removed 

Instead use str.replace() to make more sense plus less error & more to the point. The following code can generalize the use of str.replace()

def whitespace(words):
    r=words.replace(' ','') # removes all whitespace
    n=r.replace(',','|') # other uses of replace
    return n
def run():
    words=input("Enter the word to test") # take user input
    m=whitespace(words) #encase the def in run() to imporve usability on various functions
    o=m.count('f') # for testing
    return m,o
print(run())
output- ('hello|howareyou', 0)

Can be helpful while inheriting the same in diff. functions.