How do I remove leading whitespace in Python?

The lstrip() method will remove leading whitespaces, newline and tab characters on a string beginning:

>>> '     hello world!'.lstrip()
'hello world!'

Edit

As balpha pointed out in the comments, in order to remove only spaces from the beginning of the string, lstrip(' ') should be used:

>>> '   hello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'.lstrip(' ')
'\thello world with 2 spaces and a tab!'

Related question:

• Trimming a string in Python

The function strip will remove whitespace from the beginning and end of a string.

my_str = "   text "
my_str = my_str.strip()

will set my_str to "text".