Remove spaces before newlines

Question

I need to remove all spaces before the newline character throughout a string.

string = """
this is a line       \n
this is another           \n
"""

output:

string = """
this is a line\n
this is another\n
"""

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 13 '16 at 13:23

7

You can split the string into lines, strip off all whitespaces on the right using rstrip, then add a new line at the end of each line:

''.join([line.rstrip()+'\n' for line in string.splitlines()])

answered Oct 13 '16 at 13:23

Moses Koledoye

2

If the string doesn't end with a newline, this will add one (which may or may not be desirable). – ekhumoro Oct 13 '16 at 13:34
@ekhumoro Good observation. One could use this approach on a slice of the splitted lines that excludes the last and treat the last one differently. Depends on OP. – Moses Koledoye Oct 13 '16 at 13:37
1

It works but leaves a newline at the end of the string like what ekhumoro said. so, I use use rstrip() to remove that newline. works fine. – Aman Deep Oct 14 '16 at 03:19

jatinderjit · Answer 2 · 2016-10-13T16:50:26.637

4

import re
re.sub('\s+\n','\n',string)

Edit: better version from comments:

re.sub(r'\s+$', '', string, flags=re.M)

edited Oct 13 '16 at 16:50

answered Oct 13 '16 at 13:22

jatinderjit

1

This will fail for lines which don't end with a newline. Better to use `re.sub(r'\s+$', '', string, flags=re.M)`. – ekhumoro Oct 13 '16 at 13:31

score -1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

-1

As you can find here,

To remove all whitespace characters (space, tab, newline, and so on) you can use split then join:

sentence = ''.join(sentence.split())

or a regular expression:

import re
pattern = re.compile(r'\s+')
sentence = re.sub(pattern, '', sentence)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

answered Oct 13 '16 at 13:31

Kian

3

But he don't want to replace all whitespaces. – kame Oct 13 '16 at 13:39
That you'r talking about is `str.replace()` not `str.sub()` – Kian Oct 13 '16 at 13:54
OP doesn't want to remove all the whitespace in the string, only at the ends of lines. Your solution removes all the spaces, even between words in a sentence. – jatinderjit Oct 15 '16 at 07:30

3 Answers3