Pandas Trim Whitespace from Column

This short article will discuss how you can trim leading or trailing whitespace characters from a Pandas DataFrame.

Sample DataFrame

For illustration purposes, we will use the sample DataFrame shown below:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({

"product_name": [' product_1', 'product_2\t', 'product_3\n', '\nproduct_4\t', 'product_5'],

"price": [10.00, 20.50, 100.30, 500.25, 101.30]

})

The DataFrame above contains whitespace characters such as newline characters, spaces, and tabs.

Remove Leading Whitespace Characters

We can use the lstrip function to remove leading whitespace characters from a DataFrame column to remove leading whitespace characters from a DataFrame column as shown:

df.product_name.str.lstrip()

The lstrip function should remove the leading whitespace characters from the product_name column.

The code above should return:

Note that the leading space and new line whitespace characters are removed.

Remove Trailing Whitespace characters.

We can use the rstrip() function to remove trailing whitespace characters from a column.

An example is as shown:

df.product_name.str.rstrip()

Here, the code above should remove the trailing whitespace characters. An example return value is as shown:

Remove Both Leading and Trailing Whitespace Characters

Using the strip () function, you can also remove both the leading and trailing whitespace characters from a column using the strip() function.

An example usage is as shown:

df.product_name.str.strip()

In this case, the function should return:

Note how the leading and trailing whitespace characters are removed from the column.

Using Replace

You can also use the replace() function to remove whitespace characters from a column.

For example, to replace all tab characters from a column, we can do:

df.product_name.str.replace('\t', '')

In this case, the function will take the tab characters and replace them with the specified value.

The resulting output is as shown:

To remove space and newline characters:

df.product_name.str.replace('\n', '') // remove newline

df.product_name.str.replace(' ', '') // remove spaces

Terminating

This article shows you various ways of removing leading and trailing whitespace characters from a Pandas DataFrame.