How to Remove Leading Whitespaces at Start of a String in Python

John on May 28, 2021

To remove all leading whitespaces in a string in Python without modifying any other whitespaces, use the Python .lstrip() function. Pass the string to modify before the function with a . (dot) separator and store the result in a variable.

Let's demonstrate this on a string where there are unwanted spaces at the beginning but a required newline character at the end.

text = '  Some text\n'

result = text.lstrip()

print(result)

Some text