What is the pythonic way to count the leading spaces in a string?

Question

I know I can count the leading spaces in a string with this:

>>> a = "   foo bar baz qua   \n" >>> print "Leading spaces", len(a) - len(a.lstrip()) Leading spaces 3 >>> 

But is there a more pythonic way?

Answer 1

Your way is pythonic but incorrect, it will also count other whitespace chars, to count only spaces be explicit a.lstrip(' '):

a = "   \r\t\n\tfoo bar baz qua   \n" print "Leading spaces", len(a) - len(a.lstrip()) >>> Leading spaces 7 print "Leading spaces", len(a) - len(a.lstrip(' ')) >>> Leading spaces 3