How to Check If a String is Empty or Contains Whitespaces in Python

Sometimes, we must check if a string is empty or only contains Whitespaces. This check is useful when we are processing user input or handling data. Another simple way to check if a string is empty is by using the len() function. This checks the length of the string.

s = ""

if len(s) == 0:
    print("empty")
else:
    print("not empty")

empty

Let's look into various other methods to Check if string is empty or contains whitespace.

Using isspace() to Check for Whitespaces

If we only want to check if a string contains spaces (and nothing else), we can use the isspace() method. This method returns True if the string contains only whitespace characters.

s = "    "

if s.isspace():
    print("whitespaces")
else:
    print("not whitespaces")

whitespaces

Using len() and s.strip()

strip() method helps to remove all spaces so if the result is an empty string, we know the original string was just whitespace. If the string is already empty then len(s) will help toreturn zero.

s = "  "

if not s.strip():
    print("whitespaces")
elif len(s) == 0:
    print("empty")
else:
    print("contains text")

whitespaces