Check if string is None, empty or has spaces only

Question

What's the pythonic way for checking whether a string is None , empty or has only spaces? Right now I'm using the following bool check:

s is None or not s.strip()

But was wondering if there's a more elegant / Pythonic way to perform the same check. It may seem easy but following are the different issues I found with this:

• isspace returns False if the string is empty
• a bool of string which has spaces is True in Python
• We cannot call any method ( isspace or strip ) on a None object

Answer 1

The only difference I can see is doing:

not s or not s.strip()

This has a little benefit over your original way that not s will short-circuit for both None and an empty string. Then not s.strip() will finish off for only spaces.

Your s is None will only short-circuit for None obviously and then not s.strip() will check for empty or only spaces.