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Stripping unwanted leading/trailing characters from a string

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Three methods are provided that offer the ability to strip leading and trailing characters from a string: str.strip, str.rstrip and str.lstrip. All three methods have the same signature and all three return a new string object with unwanted characters removed.

str.strip([chars])

str.strip acts on a given string and removes (strips) any leading or trailing characters contained in the argument chars; if chars is not supplied or is None, all white space characters are removed by default. For example: 

>>> "    a line with leading and trailing space     ".strip() 
'a line with leading and trailing space'

If chars is supplied, all characters contained in it are removed from the string, which is returned. For example: 

>>> ">>> a Python prompt".strip('> ')  # strips '>' character and space character 
'a Python prompt'

str.rstrip([chars]) and str.lstrip([chars])

These methods have similar semantics and arguments with str.strip(), their difference lies in the direction from which they start. str.rstrip() starts from the end of the string while str.lstrip() splits from the start of the string.

For example, using str.rstrip: 

>>> "     spacious string      ".rstrip()
'     spacious string'

While, using str.lstrip: 

>>> "     spacious string      ".rstrip()
'spacious string      '
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String Methods:
* String Methods
* Changing the capitalization of a string
* str.translate Translating characters in a string
* str.format and f-strings Format values into a string
* String modules useful constants
* Replace all occurrences of one substring with another substring
* Reversing a string
* Testing what a string is composed of
* Split a string based on a delimiter into a list of strings
* Stripping unwanted leading/trailing characters from a string
* String Contains
* Join a list of strings into one string
* Counting number of times a substring appears in a string
* Case insensitive string comparisons
* Test the starting and ending characters of a string
* Justify strings
* Conversion between str or bytes data and unicode characters
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