<s>[INST] Trimming a string in Python How do I remove leading and trailing whitespace from a string in Python?
For example:
" Hello " --> "Hello"
" Hello"  --> "Hello"
"Hello "  --> "Hello"
"Bob has a cat" --> "Bob has a cat"

 [/INST] Just one space, or all such spaces?  If the second, then strings already have a .strip() method:
>>> ' Hello '.strip()
'Hello'
>>> ' Hello'.strip()
'Hello'
>>> 'Bob has a cat'.strip()
'Bob has a cat'
>>> '          Hello        '.strip()  # ALL spaces at ends removed
'Hello'

If you need only to remove one space however, you could do it with:
def strip_one_space(s):
    if s.endswith(" "): s = s[:-1]
    if s.startswith(" "): s = s[1:]
    return s

>>> strip_one_space("   Hello ")
'  Hello'

Also, note that str.strip() removes other whitespace characters as well (e.g. tabs and newlines).  To remove only spaces, you can specify the character to remove as an argument to strip, i.e.:
>>> "  Hello\n".strip(" ")
'Hello\n'

 </s>