strip

Strip removes beginning and ending whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, and line breaks), useful for reading lines of a textfile.

extracting text without surrounding spaces
>>> '    enclosed text   '.strip()
'enclosed text'

define own characters to get removed
>>> ',A,B,C,,,,,'.strip(',')
'A,B,C'

remove only from one side: left (lstrip) or right (rstrip)
>>> '0001230'.lstrip('0')
'1230'


for removing prefix or suffix, better using 'replace'
>>> 'www.example.com'.replace('www.','')
'example.com'



https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=strip#str.strip