Iterating over a dictionary in python and stripping white space

Question

I am working with the web scraping framework Scrapy and I am a bit of a noob when it comes to python. So I am wondering how do I iterate over all of the scraped items which

Answer 1

What you should note is that lstrip() returns a copy of the string rather than modify the object. To actually update your dictionary, you'll need to assign the stripped value back to the item.

For example:

for k, v in your_dict.iteritems():
    your_dict[k] = v.lstrip()

Note the use of .iteritems() which returns an iterator instead of a list of key value pairs. This makes it somewhat more efficient.

I should add that in Python3, .item() has been changed to return "views" and so .iteritems() would not be required.