Question

I’m a bit new to python and can’t figure out why this is not working.
I have a variable that is something like this:

[u'\n                Data I want              ']

but I also have variables that are simply:

[u'                more Data I want              ']

I am running the variables through a loop but I need to strip all the extra stuff around the data. I created a function to deal with this but I’m not sure why its not working(I’m not sure but I suspect \n is a special character)

def stripName(name):
    name = str(name)
    if name.startswith( "\n" ):
        print "starts with new line"
        name = name[5:-2]
    else:
        print "does not start with new line"
        name = name[3:-2]
    return name

The problem is the “if name.startswith( “\n” )” never matches..I’ve looked at other examples and I think I’m doing it as they are. I even triedif name.startswith( "\n" ) == 'True': but that didn’t work either.

Thanks in advance for any insight you guys can give.

Answer 1

How about:

def stripName(name):
    return name[0].strip()

?