python convention lstrip(s[, chars]). What does "[, chars]" signifies?

Question

I'm a newbie in programming. I was reading the Python documentation and could not understand the "s[, chars]" in lstrip(s[, chars]).

I'll appreciate if you can enlighten me.

The brackets indicate an optional argument. It means you don't have to pass `chars`. — BrenBarn, Sep 21 '15 at 06:03
You need a comma to separate arguments. For example: oneArgFunction(x) versus twoArgFunction(x, y) — Nayuki, Sep 21 '15 at 13:34

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 21 '15 at 06:03

chars specifies the set of characters that should be stripped from the left end of the string.

The square brackets denote that the argument is optional. If not specified, there is a default set of characters to strip.

Examples:

Note: This function string.lstrip() only exists in Python 2, not 3.

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