What is the whitespace constant in Python?

The string module

The string module in Python is a collection of different constants.

The whitespace constant

The whitespace constant in the string module contains the characters that are considered whitespace.

The value of the constant is as follows:

 \t\n\r\x0b\x0c

Syntax

string.whitespace

Since whitespace is a constant, we can access it via the string module.

Let’s look at two code examples that use the whitespace constant.

Example 1

Explanation

• Line 1: We import the string module.

• Line 3: We store the output of string.whitespace in the whitespace_output variable.

• Line 5: We print the whitespace_output variable.

Example 2

Explanation

• Line 1: We import the string module.

• Lines 3–9: We define a function called contains_whitespace that accepts a string as its parameter. It also checks whether this string contains any whitespace characters or not.

• Line 11: We define a string called str_to_check_1 with no whitespace characters.

• Line 12: We invoke the contains_whitespace function by passing str_to_check_1 as the parameter.

• Line 14: We define a string called str_to_check_2 containing whitespace characters.

• Line 15: The contains_whitespace function is invoked passing str_to_check_2 as the parameter.