stripping spaces in front of line

[James Stroud]

eight02645999 at yahoo.com wrote:
> hi
> wish to ask a qns on strip
> i wish to strip all spaces in front of a line (in text file)
> 
> f = open("textfile","rU")
> while (1):
>         line = f.readline().strip()
>         if line == '':
>                 break
>         print line
> f.close()
> 
> in "textfile", i added some spaces in and then ran the code, it prints
> out the lines without the spaces in front. I double checked "textfile"
> and it does contains some lines with spaces in front.
> Is it true that "readline().strip()" perform the removing of spaces in
> front of a line as well? Is it documented anywhere?
> I am using Windows environment. thanks
> 

You have observed the expected behavior. If you only want the trailing 
spaces stripped, try "rstrip". If you only want the leading spaces 
stripped, try "lstrip". If you want no space anywhere try this:

line = "".join(f.readline().split())

If you want to normalize space, do this:

line = " ".join(f.readline().split())

This should fulfill 90% of your space-transforming requirements.

James