How do I count the number of spaces at the left end of a string?

[James Stroud]

walterbyrd wrote:
> I don't know exactly what the first non-space character is. I know the
> first non-space character will be  * or an alphanumeric character.
> 

This is another of the hundreds of ways:

py> for i,c in enumerate(astring):
...   if c != ' ': break
...
py> print i