Credit: Luther Blissett 3.5.1 ProblemYou need to work on a string without regard for any extra leading or trailing spaces a user may have typed. 3.5.2 SolutionThat's what the lstrip, rstrip, and strip methods of string objects are for. Each takes no argument and returns the starting string, shorn of whitespace on either or both sides: >>> x = ' hej ' >>> print '|', x.lstrip(), '|', x.rstrip(), '|', x.strip( ), '|' | hej | hej | hej | 3.5.3 DiscussionJust as you may need to add space to either end of a string to align that string left, right, or center in a field of fixed width, so may you need to remove all whitespace (blanks, tabs, newlines, etc.) from either or both ends. Because this is a frequent need, Python string objects supply this functionality through their methods. 3.5.4 See AlsoThe Library Reference section on string methods; Java Cookbook Recipe 3.12. |