Remove all whitespace in a string

Question

I want to eliminate all the whitespace from a string, on both ends, and in between words.

I have this Python code:

def my_handle(self):
    sentence          


        

Answer 1

"Whitespace" includes space, tabs, and CRLF. So an elegant and one-liner string function we can use is str.translate:

Python 3

' hello  apple '.translate(str.maketrans('', '', ' \n\t\r'))

OR if you want to be thorough:

import string
' hello  apple'.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.whitespace))

Python 2

' hello  apple'.translate(None, ' \n\t\r')

OR if you want to be thorough:

import string
' hello  apple'.translate(None, string.whitespace)

Answer 2

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 re
pattern = 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.

Answer 3

import re    
sentence = ' hello  apple'
re.sub(' ','',sentence) #helloworld (remove all spaces)
re.sub('  ',' ',sentence) #hello world (remove double spaces)

Answer 4

For removing whitespace from beginning and end, use strip.

>> "  foo bar   ".strip()
"foo bar"

Answer 5

' hello  \n\tapple'.translate({ord(c):None for c in ' \n\t\r'})

MaK already pointed out the "translate" method above. And this variation works with Python 3 (see this Q&A).

Answer 6

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'