Final answer:
The string method called lstrip removes all the leading whitespace characters from a string. It is different from rstrip, which removes trailing whitespace, and strip, which removes both leading and trailing whitespace.
Step-by-step explanation:
The string method that returns a copy of the string with all leading whitespace characters removed is named lstrip. This method is part of many programming languages that offer string manipulation capabilities, such as Python. When you use lstrip() on a string, it will eliminate all the whitespace characters (such as spaces, tabs, and newline characters) that appear before the first non-whitespace character in the string.
For example, if you have a string like '\t hello world!', applying lstrip() to it would result in 'hello world!', with the leading tab character removed.
In contrast, the rstrip method is used to remove trailing whitespace characters at the end of a string, while the strip method removes both leading and trailing whitespace characters.