Regular Expression - Python - Remove Leading Whitespace

Question

I search a text file for the word Offering with a regular expression. I then use the start and end points from that search to look down the column and pull the integers. Some instances (column A) have leading white-space I do not want. I want to print just the number (as would be found in Column B) into a file, no leading white-space. Regex in a regex? Conditional?

price = re.search(r'(^|\s)off(er(ing)?)?', line, re.I)
if price:
    ps = price.start()
    pe = price.end()

             A             B
           Offering       Offer
            56.00         55.00 
            45.00         45.55
            65.222        32.00

NPE · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-22 16:25:44Z

9

You could use strip() to remove leading and trailing whitespaces:

In [1]: ' 56.00  '.strip()
Out[1]: '56.00'

answered Sep 22, 2011 at 16:25

NPE

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2 Comments

Captain Cretaceous Over a year ago

In the context of the regex result? I cannot .strip() the whole text file.

NPE Over a year ago

@CaptainCretaceous: You'll have to read it line by line (sorry, I thought that part was sufficiently obvious) and for each line do line[ps:pe].strip()

ankit2saxena · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-29 03:53:09Z

2

'^\s+|\s+$'

Use this to regular expression access leading and trailing whitespaces.

answered Apr 29, 2018 at 3:53

ankit2saxena

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Comments

Sandeep Raju Prabhakar · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-22 05:34:45Z

1

If you want to remove only the leading white spaces using regular expressions, you can use re.sub to do that.

>>> import re
>>>re.sub(r"^\s+" , "" , "  56.45")
'56.45'

edited Jul 22, 2016 at 5:34

Sandeep Raju Prabhakar

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answered Jul 22, 2016 at 5:03

kbsri harsha

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