pyt...@bdurham.com wrote:
I'm looking for a pythonic way to trim and keep leading
whitespace in a string.
Use case: I have a bunch of text strings with various amounts of
leading and trailing whitespace (spaces and tabs). I want to grab
the leading and trailing whitespace, save it, surround the
remaining text with html tags, and then add back the leading and
trailing whitespace.
The only solution I can think of is regex, and that makes me
think of the 2 proverbial problems that come with that :)
Just in case you're okay with a regexp solution, you can use
>>> s = "\t\tabc def "
>>> import re
>>> r = re.compile(r'^(\s*)(.*?)(\s*)$')
>>> m = re.match(s)
>>> m.groups()
('\t\t', 'abc def', ' ')
>>> leading, text, trailing = m.groups()
While Emile's solution works nicely for your particular use-case,
in the event you need to discern between leading/trailing
whitespace, the above makes it pretty easy.
-tkc
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