lstrip, rstrip and strip remove characters from the left, right and both ends of a string respectively. By default they remove whitespace characters (space, tabs, linebreaks, etc) Without strip (), bananas is present in the dictionary but with an empty string as value. With strip (), this code will throw an exception because it strips the tab of the banana line. Dec 9, 2012 · I was told it deletes whitespace but s = "ss asdas vsadsafas asfasasgas" print(s.strip()) prints out ss asdas vsadsafas asfasasgas shouldn't it be ssasdasvsadsafasasfasasgas? 3 Just to add a few examples to Jim's answer, according to .strip() docs: Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters removed. The chars argument is a string specifying the set of … So I was having problems with a code before because I was getting an empty line when I iterated through the foodList. Someone suggested using the 'if x.strip():' method as seen below. Oct 8, 2015 · Pointers: strip returns a new string, so you need to assign that to something. However, strings in Python are immutable and can't be modified, i.e.