Python String lstrip() Method

The lstrip() method removes leading whitespace characters from a string. We can also specify custom characters to remove from the beginning/starting of the string.

Let's take an example to remove whitespace from the starting of a string.

s = "   Hello Python!"
res = s.lstrip()
print(res)

Hello Python!

Syntax of lstrip() Method

s.lstrip(chars)

• s: The input string
• chars (optional): A set of characters to remove as trailing characters

Examples of lstrip() Method

Remove Trailing Whitespaces

s = "   Hello Python!     "
res = s.lstrip()
print(res)

Hello Python!     

Remove Custom Characters

If we have a string with various characters that we want to remove from starting of the string then we can use lstrip().

s = '  ##*#Hello Python!#**##  '
# removes all occurrences of '#', '*', and ' ' 
# from the end of string
res = s.lstrip('#* ')
print(res)

Hello Python!#**##  

Notes:

• lstrip('#* ') removes any #, *, and spaces from the starting/beginning of string.
• It stops stripping characters from the start of string once it encounters a character that are not in the specified set of characters.

Remove Newline Characters

We can also remove the leading newline characters (\n) from a string.

s = '\nHello Python!\n'
# Removing newline characters
# from the end of string
res = s.lstrip()
print(res)

Hello Python!