How to remove leading and trailing spaces from a string?

I'm having a hard time trying to use .strip with the following line of code:

f.write(re.split("Tech ID:|Name:|Account #:",line)[-1])

You can use the strip() method to remove trailing and leading spaces:

>>> s = '   abd cde   '
>>> s.strip()
'abd cde'

Note: the internal spaces are preserved.