Python Forum

data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
product, price, condition, available, rating = data.split('|')

Is there an easy way to strip leading and trailing spaces with the strip() function
without having to do each item separately?

map and strip from string module

from string import strip
data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
product, price, condition, available, rating = map(strip, data.split('|'))

map and lambda

data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
product, price, condition, available, rating = map(lambda s:s.strip(), data.split('|'))

using list comprehension

data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
product, price, condition, available, rating = [s.strip() for s in data.split('|')]

You can use strip on same line:

>>> data = ' Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good '.strip()
>>> data
'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
>>>

Also split at  ' | ' if consistent

data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
product, price, condition, available, rating = data.split(' | '))

Thanks to buran & Larz60+ for the quick replies.
Let me work thru them and see if I have any more questions.

buran - your #1 gives me a "Import Error: cannot import name 'strip'".
If I use import string & string.strip, it gives me a "AttributeError; module 'string' has no attribute "strip'".
Is this an old way of doing this that has been done away with?
Your #2 & #3 work just fine.

It has been removed with Python 3. I guess the cause was code duplication. You can use instead str.strip.

The str object has strip method. Any string is an str object so: "any string".strip()

In [1]: s = "a string"

In [2]: type(s)
Out[2]: str

In [3]: dir(s)
Out[3]: 
# I've removed the __dunder__  functions to shorten the output
['capitalize',
 'casefold',
 'center',
 'count',
 'encode',
 'endswith',
 'expandtabs',
 'find',
 'format',
 'format_map',
 'index',
 'isalnum',
 'isalpha',
 'isdecimal',
 'isdigit',
 'isidentifier',
 'islower',
 'isnumeric',
 'isprintable',
 'isspace',
 'istitle',
 'isupper',
 'join',
 'ljust',
 'lower',
 'lstrip',
 'maketrans',
 'partition',
 'replace',
 'rfind',
 'rindex',
 'rjust',
 'rpartition',
 'rsplit',
 'rstrip',
 'split',
 'splitlines',
 'startswith',
 'strip',                # here it is. 
 'swapcase',
 'title',
 'translate',
 'upper',
 'zfill']

In [4]: type("another string")
Out[4]: str

In [5]: "_strip it_".strip('_') # without an argument stip() will strip the whitespaces -  ' \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'
Out[5]: 'strip it'

Dead_EyE is right in python 3 you can use str.strip
 

Python 3.5.2 (default, Jul 17 2016, 00:00:00) 
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> data = 'Red Duck | $125 | New | Ready | Very Good'
>>> product, price, condition, available, rating = map(str.strip, data.split('|'))
>>> print(product, rating)
Red Duck Very Good
>>> 

My bad, I should have mentioned it's python2 or leave it out

buran - If I use ' | ' (with the spaces) in the interpreter, it gives me an error. If I use it
in a program, it runs, but I end up with no data extracted. This is very strange.

BTW, how did you get that little box around ' | '?