how to avoid leading white spaces

[Karim]

On 06/01/2011 09:39 PM, rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:
> On Jun 1, 11:11 am, Chris Rebert<c... at rebertia.com>  wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:31 AM, rakesh kumar
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> i have a file which contains data
>>>
>>> //ACCDJ         EXEC DB2UNLDC,DFLID=&DFLID,PARMLIB=&PARMLIB,
>>> //         UNLDSYST=&UNLDSYST,DATABAS=MBQV1D0A,TABLE='ACCDJ       '
>>> //ACCT          EXEC DB2UNLDC,DFLID=&DFLID,PARMLIB=&PARMLIB,
>>> //         UNLDSYST=&UNLDSYST,DATABAS=MBQV1D0A,TABLE='ACCT        '
>>> //ACCUM         EXEC DB2UNLDC,DFLID=&DFLID,PARMLIB=&PARMLIB,
>>> //         UNLDSYST=&UNLDSYST,DATABAS=MBQV1D0A,TABLE='ACCUM       '
>>> //ACCUM1        EXEC DB2UNLDC,DFLID=&DFLID,PARMLIB=&PARMLIB,
>>> //         UNLDSYST=&UNLDSYST,DATABAS=MBQV1D0A,TABLE='ACCUM1      '
>>>
>>> i want to cut the white spaces which are in between single quotes after TABLE=.
>>>
>>> for example :
>>>                                 'ACCT[spaces] '
>>>                                 'ACCUM           '
>>>                                 'ACCUM1         '
>>> the above is the output of another python script but its having a leading spaces.
>> Er, you mean trailing spaces. Since this is easy enough to be
>> homework, I will only give an outline:
>>
>> 1. Use str.index() and str.rindex() to find the positions of the
>> starting and ending single-quotes in the line.
>> 2. Use slicing to extract the inside of the quoted string.
>> 3. Use str.rstrip() to remove the trailing spaces from the extracted string.
>> 4. Use slicing and concatenation to join together the rest of the line
>> with the now-stripped inner string.
>>
>> Relevant docs:http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods
> For some odd reason (perhaps because they are used a lot in Perl),
> this groups seems to have a great aversion to regular expressions.
> Too bad because this is a typical problem where their use is the
> best solution.
>
>      import re
>      f = open ("your file")
>      for line in f:
>          fixed = re.sub (r"(TABLE='\S+)\s+'$", r"\1'", line)
>          print fixed,
>
> (The above is for Python-2, adjust as needed for Python-3)
Rurpy,
Your solution is neat.
Simple is better than complicated... (at list for this simple issue)