Remove Leading And Trailing Spaces But Not In Between The Words

I'm converting a database table into a CSV file with '|' as a delimiter. i have an output of database table like :- Table:- |London | Jul 9 2014 1:21PM |john

Solution 1:

Split on the bars, then strip the results with str.strip():

withopen(csv_file, 'w') as f:
    for line in table:
        line = '|'.join([c.strip() for c in line.split('|')])
        f.write(line + '\n')

I'm opening the output file as a context manager here; no need to call f.close() in that case (although your code doesn't actually callf.close()). You'll also need to add \n newlines (as you just stripped the whitespace off).

Demo:

>>>table = '''\...|London          |       Jul  9 2014  1:21PM  |john         |...|New York        |       Jul  9 2014  1:21PM  |peter        |...|New Zeland      |       Jul  9 2014  1:21PM  |Mr. Jones    |...'''.splitlines()>>>for line in table:...    line = '|'.join([c.strip() for c in line.split('|')])...print line... 
|London|Jul  9 2014  1:21PM|john|
|New York|Jul  9 2014  1:21PM|peter|
|New Zeland|Jul  9 2014  1:21PM|Mr. Jones|

Solution 2:

You can use regex

import re
f = open(csv_file,'w')
for lines in Table:
    lines = re.sub(r' *\| *','|',lines)  # Remove spaces before and after the pipe character
    f.write(lines)
f.close()