What is the pythonic way to count the leading spaces in a string?

Question

I know I can count the leading spaces in a string with this:

>>> a = \"   foo bar baz qua   \\n\"
>>> print \"Leading spaces\", len(a) - le         


        

Answer 1

Your way is pythonic but incorrect, it will also count other whitespace chars, to count only spaces be explicit a.lstrip(' '):

a = "   \r\t\n\tfoo bar baz qua   \n"
print "Leading spaces", len(a) - len(a.lstrip())
>>> Leading spaces 7
print "Leading spaces", len(a) - len(a.lstrip(' '))
>>> Leading spaces 3