If you want to remove leading and ending spaces, use str.strip():
>>> " hello apple ".strip()
'hello apple'
If you want to remove all space characters, use str.replace() (NB this only removes the “normal” ASCII space character ' ' U+0020 but not any other whitespace):
>>> " hello apple ".replace(" ", "")
'helloapple'
If you want to remove duplicated spaces, use str.split() followed by str.join():
>>> " ".join(" hello apple ".split())
'hello apple'