what is trailing whitespace and how can I handle this?

flake8, pep8, python

Solution

Trailing whitespace is any spaces or tabs after the last non-whitespace character on the line until the newline.

In your posted question, there is one extra space after `try:`, and there are 12 extra spaces after `pass`:

>>> post_text = '''\
...             if self.tagname and self.tagname2 in list1:
...                 try: 
...                     question = soup.find("div", "post-text")
...                     title = soup.find("a", "question-hyperlink")
...                     self.list2.append(str(title)+str(question)+url)
...                     current += 1
...                 except AttributeError:
...                     pass            
...             logging.info("%s questions passed, %s questions \
...                 collected" % (count, current))
...             count += 1
...         return self.list2
... '''
>>> for line in post_text.splitlines():
...     if line.rstrip() != line:
...         print(repr(line))
... 
'                try: '
'                    pass            '

See where the strings end? There are spaces before the lines (indentation), but also spaces after.

Use your editor to find the end of the line and backspace. Many modern text editors can also automatically remove trailing whitespace from the end of the line, for example every time you save a file.

Problem

Original source