pandas - Getting polish characters in python - Stack Overflow This is called trimming. If you can use Boost, I’d recommend it.. Otherwise, use find_first_not_of to get the index of the first non- whitespace character, then find_last_not_of to get the index from the end that isn’t whitespace . With these, use substr to get the sub- string with no surrounding whitespace .. In response to your edit, I don’t know the term but I’d guess something along the lines ...