how to strip white space after a character only in python code example

Example 1: python remove whitespace from start of string

'     hello world!    '.strip()
'hello world!'


'     hello world!    '.lstrip()
'hello world!    '

'     hello world!    '.rstrip()
'    hello world!'

Example 2: how to strip white space of text in python?

sentence = ' hello  apple'
" ".join(sentence.split())
>>> 'hello apple'