What does s.strip() do exactly?

Question

I was told it deletes whitespace but

s = "ss asdas vsadsafas asfasasgas"

print(s.strip())

prints out

ss asdas vsadsafas asfasasgas

shouldn't it be ssasdasvsadsafasasfasasgas?

Answer 1

You should perhaps check out the docs for the function. It trims leading and trailing whitespace. " ss ss ".strip() becomes "ss ss"

Relevant link: http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#str.strip

Additionally, there is a very powerful tool within the Python interactive interpreter - you can do something like help("".strip) to get a bevy of useful information.

Answer 2

Definition from Python's reference:

str.strip([chars])

Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters removed. The chars argument is a string specifying the set of characters to be removed. If omitted or None, the chars argument defaults to removing whitespace. The chars argument is not a prefix or suffix; rather, all combinations of its values are stripped: