Why isn't my whitespace being eliminated?

Question

Why isn't the initial whitespace being removed in this example?

s = ' Spain'
s = s.replace('\s*', '')

In[1]:s
Out[1]: ' Spain'

I noticed this when I was removing whitespaces from a series using pandas .str.replace, so I tried in this simple example and did not understand why this does not work.

replace() takes strings, not regular expressions. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16720541/python-string-replace-regular-expression — Mateusz Mrozewski, May 19 '19 at 22:57
Why not use the "strip" function (or rstrip or lstrip)? It's much simpler. — Paul Cornelius, May 19 '19 at 23:03
@Paul Cornelius Because in my case there are multiple whitespaces in my strings, not just on the left and right ends — Manic, May 19 '19 at 23:12

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 19 '19 at 23:00

2

>>> s = ' Spain'
>>>
>>> # Regex
>>> re.sub('\s*', '', s)
'Spain'
>>>
>>> # str.lstrip
>>> s.lstrip()
'Spain'
>>>

answered May 19 '19 at 23:00

Işık Kaplan

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 19 '19 at 23:07

If you need to remove spaces only, use

s = s.replace(' ', '')

Note: replace does not work with regexes.

If you need to remove whitespace characters only from the beginning and the end, use

s = s.strip()

If you need to eliminate all of the whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, newlines), you can use

s = ''.join(s.split())

Why isn't my whitespace being eliminated?

2 Answers2