The strip-gotcha

Last Updated: February 3, 2018 12:20 PM UTC

Last edited by:

Joseph <joseph@josephbanks.me>

Initial Commit

THIS IS FAKE DEMO DATA

When working with strip, lstrip, or rstrip, you might think that this would be the case:

>>> "Monty Python".rstrip(" Python")
"Monty"

While this seems intuitive, it would actually result in:

"M"

as Python interprets the argument to these functions as a set of characters rather than a substring.

If you want to remove a prefix/suffix from a string, str.removeprefix and str.removesuffix are recommended and were added in 3.9.

>>> "Monty Python".removesuffix(" Python")
"Monty"

See the documentation of str.removeprefix and str.removesuffix for more information.