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Whitespace is a character that creates spacing or a break in text: ordinary spaces, tabs, and line breaks are common examples. To remove it, first decide whether you mean trimming only the beginning and end, cleaning up repeated spaces while keeping words apart, or deleting every matched whitespace character—including those between words. Those operations produce different results.

What does “whitespace” mean?

Whitespace is not necessarily an ordinary space. Text can contain tabs, line breaks, and less visible characters such as a nonbreaking space. These characters may look like gaps, but different apps and programming tools do not always treat them alike.

Choose the result you need before changing text:

  • Trim: remove whitespace at the start, the end, or both ends while leaving internal characters alone.
  • Normalize spacing: remove leading and trailing spaces and reduce repeated internal spaces to one, preserving word boundaries.
  • Delete whitespace: remove every character matched by a chosen rule, which can join words together.

Remove or clean spaces in Excel and Google Sheets

Excel

To remove leading and trailing ordinary spaces and reduce repeated ordinary spaces between words to one, enter =TRIM(A1) in another cell, replacing A1 with the cell you want to clean. Microsoft explains that Excel’s TRIM function is designed for the ordinary ASCII space (value 32); it does not remove a nonbreaking space by itself. Microsoft Support states: “By itself, the TRIM function does not remove this nonbreaking space character.” See Microsoft’s Excel TRIM function guidance.

If imported text still appears to have gaps after TRIM, the characters may not be ordinary spaces. Microsoft describes using combinations of TRIM, CLEAN, and SUBSTITUTE for specific unwanted characters. SUBSTITUTE can replace a known character with an ordinary space before trimming; CLEAN addresses certain control characters. Identify the character in the data and apply only the substitutions needed rather than assuming one formula removes every invisible character. Microsoft’s data-cleaning guidance explains these combinations.

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Google Sheets

Use =TRIM(A1) to remove leading and trailing ordinary spaces and reduce repeated ordinary spaces between words to one. Google notes that TRIM does not remove nonbreaking spaces. For a range, the Sheets API’s TrimWhitespaceRequest trims whitespace at cell-text ends and reduces internal whitespace subsequences to one space; it is a range-level API operation, not the same as deleting every whitespace character. Details are in Google’s TRIM function help and Sheets API request reference.

Sheets CLEAN removes non-printable ASCII characters, not non-printable Unicode characters outside ASCII. It is not a universal fix for invisible text. Google’s CLEAN function help describes that limitation, and its instructions for trimming whitespace also note the nonbreaking-space caveat.

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Remove whitespace from a string in Python

Trim the ends

Use text.strip() to remove whitespace from both ends of a string, text.lstrip() for the left end, or text.rstrip() for the right. These methods do not remove whitespace inside the string. Python documents this behavior in its built-in types reference.

Delete matched whitespace throughout the string

If you intend to remove whitespace within the text as well, a common pattern is re.sub(r"s+", "", text) after importing Python’s re module. For a Unicode string, Python regular-expression s matches the characters recognized by str.isspace(). In ASCII mode, it is limited to [ tnrfv]. This replacement deletes matched separators, so words such as "red apple" become "redapple". Check the intended character set and output before using it. See Python’s regular-expression documentation.

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Remove whitespace from a string in JavaScript

Trim the ends

Use text.trim() for both ends, text.trimStart() for the start, or text.trimEnd() for the end. These methods do not remove internal spaces. MDN documents them under String.prototype.trim().

Remove internal whitespace

To remove internal whitespace too, use a replacement pattern chosen for the characters in your input and the result you want. A pattern that matches ordinary spaces alone will not necessarily match tabs, line breaks, nonbreaking spaces, or every other invisible character. Inspect the data and verify the result; trimming the ends is not a substitute for this whole-string operation.

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Which method should you use?

Need Suitable approach What it does
Remove whitespace at the ends of a Python string strip(), lstrip(), or rstrip() Removes matching whitespace at both ends, the left end, or the right end; preserves internal whitespace.
Remove whitespace at the ends of a JavaScript string trim(), trimStart(), or trimEnd() Trims both ends, the start, or the end; preserves internal whitespace.
Clean ordinary spacing in a spreadsheet cell Excel or Sheets =TRIM(A1) Removes leading and trailing ordinary spaces and collapses repeated ordinary spaces between words to one. Does not, by itself, remove nonbreaking spaces.
Delete whitespace throughout a Python string re.sub(r"s+", "", text) Deletes characters matched by Python’s Unicode-aware s behavior; ASCII mode narrows the match set.

Spreadsheet TRIM functions and string methods are not interchangeable: spreadsheet TRIM preserves one ordinary internal space, while the Python replacement example deletes matched separators throughout the string. Before deleting all whitespace, check whether tabs and line breaks are also meant to disappear; removing separators can change words, fields, or structured text.

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