ltrim on a block of text?

[Bjorn Pettersen]

Say I have a variable

s = """
      void f(int x) {
          printf("%d\n", x);
      }
"""

and I want to transform it to a list of lines L such that '\n'.join(L) would
give:

"""
void f(int x) {
    printf("%d\n", x);
}
"""

i.e. I want to slice off the whitespace on the left of the entire block...
Is there a good way to do this?

My current approach seems a little fragile ;-)

    def ltrimBlock(block):
        """Trim all the whitespace on the left of a block of text."""
        txt = block.split('\n')
        
        # the second line is more likely to contain the indentation
        # we want to remove (if it is present).
        if len(txt) > 2:
            first = txt[1]
        else:
            first = txt[0]
            
        count = 0
        for c in first:
            if c in ' \t':
                count += 1
            else:
                break
        return [ line[count:] for line in txt ]

-- bjorn