Remove all whitespace in a string Remove all whitespace in a string python python

Remove all whitespace in a string


If you want to remove leading and ending spaces, use str.strip():

sentence = ' hello  apple'sentence.strip()>>> 'hello  apple'

If you want to remove all space characters, use str.replace():

(NB this only removes the “normal” ASCII space character ' ' U+0020 but not any other whitespace)

sentence = ' hello  apple'sentence.replace(" ", "")>>> 'helloapple'

If you want to remove duplicated spaces, use str.split():

sentence = ' hello  apple'" ".join(sentence.split())>>> 'hello apple'


To remove only spaces use str.replace:

sentence = sentence.replace(' ', '')

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

If you want to only remove whitespace from the beginning and end you can use strip:

sentence = sentence.strip()

You can also use lstrip to remove whitespace only from the beginning of the string, and rstrip to remove whitespace from the end of the string.


An alternative is to use regular expressions and match these strange white-space characters too. Here are some examples:

Remove ALL spaces in a string, even between words:

import resentence = re.sub(r"\s+", "", sentence, flags=re.UNICODE)

Remove spaces in the BEGINNING of a string:

import resentence = re.sub(r"^\s+", "", sentence, flags=re.UNICODE)

Remove spaces in the END of a string:

import resentence = re.sub(r"\s+$", "", sentence, flags=re.UNICODE)

Remove spaces both in the BEGINNING and in the END of a string:

import resentence = re.sub("^\s+|\s+$", "", sentence, flags=re.UNICODE)

Remove ONLY DUPLICATE spaces:

import resentence = " ".join(re.split("\s+", sentence, flags=re.UNICODE))

(All examples work in both Python 2 and Python 3)