Python Remove Spaces from String

Python provides various ways to remove white-spaces from a String. This article will focus of some of the efficient techniques to remove spaces from a String.

Either of the following techniques can be used to get rid of the spaces from a string:

By using strip() method
By using replace() method
By using join() with split() method
By using translate() method
By using Regular Expressions

Method 1: By using strip() method

The split() function basically removes the leading and the trailing spaces of the string.

Key points:

strip(): This function removes the leading and the trailing spaces from an array including the tabs(\t).
lstrip(): This function removes spaces from the left end of the string.
rstrip(): This function removes spaces from the right end of the string.

Example:

string = '   Safa Mulani is a student of Engineering Discipline.    '

print(f'String =\'{string}\'')

print(f'After Removing Leading Whitespaces String =\'{string.lstrip()}\'')

print(f'After Removing Trailing Whitespaces String =\'{string.rstrip()}\'')

print(f'After Trimming Whitespaces String =\'{string.strip()}\'')

Output:

Method 2: By using replace() method

This function removes all the spaces from the string, removes spaces between words too.

Example:

def remove(string_input): 
    return string_input.replace(" ", "") 
      

string_input = ' S a f a '
print(remove(string_input))

Output:

Safa

Method 3: By using join() and split() method

The join() and split() function work in accordance altogether. Firstly, the split() method returns a list of words in the entire string using a delimiter. Then we need to use the join() method to concatenate them.

Example:

def remove(string_input): 
    return "".join(string_input.split()) 
      
# Driver Program 
string_input= ' S a f a '
print(remove(string_input))

Output:

Safa

Method 4: By using translate() method

In the above example, the translate() function removes all of the white-spaces from the string and results in a compact string as output.

Method 5: By using Regular Expressions

The re.sub() function is used to remove the white-spaces from a string.

import re

string = '  Engineering and Medical are altogether different disciplines. \t\n Agreed!!  '

print('String after removal of all the spaces using Regular Expressions:\n', re.sub(r"\s+", "", string), sep='') 


print('String after removal of leading spaces using Regular Expressions:\n', re.sub(r"^\s+", "", string), sep='')  # ^ matches start

print('String after removal of trailing spaces using Regular Expressions:\n', re.sub(r"\s+$", "", string), sep='')  # $ matches end

print('String after removal of leading and trailing spaces using Regular Expressions:\n', re.sub(r"^\s+|\s+$", "", string), sep='')  # | for OR condition

Output:

Conclusion

Thus, in this article we have implemented various techniques to remove white-spaces from an input string in Python.

References