Trim specific leading and trailing characters from a string

Question:

I have a string that contains a path

str = "/example/path/with/different/trailing/delimiter"

and I want to trim the leading and trailing / and . What is the best practice in Python 3?

Currently I’m using

trimmedPath = str.strip("/\")
# trimmedPath is "example/path/with/different/trailing/delimiter" as desired

Two questions:

  1. Is this the best trim function for trimming specific characters in Python 3?
  2. Are there specific path functions for such operations in Python 3 so I don’t have to set the delimiters manually?
Asked By: Roi Danton

||

Answers:

I believe strip is the pythonic way. It is usually the case when there is a builtin function.

There are a few builtin path manipulators available in the os library. You might want to use them if one of the manipulators is a match for your use case.

Answered By: pmuntima

Example of strip() in action; in this case, removing a leading plus sign:

In [1]: phone_number = "+14158889999"

In [2]: phone_number.strip('+')
Out[2]: '14158889999'
Answered By: mager
Categories: questions Tags: ,
Answers are sorted by their score. The answer accepted by the question owner as the best is marked with
at the top-right corner.