Remove leading whitespace from text values in polars

strip_chars_start

Your data may contain leading characters like spaces or tabs due to bad user input. Below is a dataframe showing values with leading whitespace.

shape: (4, 2)

Actress	DOB
str	str
" Kate Winslet"	"1975-10-05"
"  Lupita Nyong'o"	"1983-03-01"
"   Emma Stone"	"1988-11-06"
" Gabrielle Union"	"1972-10-29"

Remove whitespace

To remove the unnecessary spaces and tabs at the beginning of values in Actress, you can use the Polars expression strip_chars_start, like this:

(df
 .with_columns(pl.col('Actress').str.strip_chars_start())
 )

shape: (4, 2)

Actress	DOB
str	str
"Kate Winslet"	"1975-10-05"
"Lupita Nyong'o"	"1983-03-01"
"Emma Stone"	"1988-11-06"
"Gabrielle Union"	"1972-10-29"

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