title: str.startswith() not working as I intended
body: <p>I'm trying to test for a /t or a space character and I can't understand why this bit of code won't work. What I am doing is reading in a file, counting the loc for the file, and then recording the names of each function present within the file along with their individual lines of code. The bit of code below is where I attempt to count the loc for the functions.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import re
  
  ...
      else:
              loc += 1
              for line in infile:
                  line_t = line.lstrip()
                  if len(line_t) &gt; 0 \
                  and not line_t.startswith('#') \
                  and not line_t.startswith('"""'):
                      if not line.startswith('\s'):
                          print ('line = ' + repr(line))
                          loc += 1
                          return (loc, name)
                      else:
                          loc += 1
                  elif line_t.startswith('"""'):
                      while True:
                          if line_t.rstrip().endswith('"""'):
                              break
                          line_t = infile.readline().rstrip()
  
              return(loc,name)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Enter the file name: test.txt
  line = '\tloc = 0\n'
  
  There were 19 lines of code in "test.txt"
  
  Function names:
  
      count_loc -- 2 lines of code
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As you can see, my test print for the line shows a /t, but the if statement explicitly says (or so I thought) that it should only execute with no whitespace characters present.</p>
  
  <p>Here is my full test file I have been using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def count_loc(infile):
      """ Receives a file and then returns the amount
          of actual lines of code by not counting commented
          or blank lines """
  
      loc = 0
      for line in infile:
          line = line.strip()
          if len(line) &gt; 0 \
          and not line.startswith('//') \
          and not line.startswith('/*'):
              loc += 1
              func_loc, func_name = checkForFunction(line);
          elif line.startswith('/*'):
              while True:
                  if line.endswith('*/'):
                      break
                  line = infile.readline().rstrip()
  
      return loc
  
   if __name__ == "__main__":
      print ("Hi")
      Function LOC = 15
      File LOC = 19
  </code></pre>