Remove last character if it's a backslash

Question:

Is there a function to chomp last character in the string if it’s some special character? For example, I need to remove backslash if it’s there, and do nothing, if not. I know I can do it with regex easily, but wonder if there something like a small built-in function for that.

Asked By: Sergei Basharov

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Answers:

Use rstrip to strip the specified character(s) from the right side of the string.

my_string = my_string.rstrip('\')

See: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.rstrip

Answered By: FogleBird

If you don’t mind all trailing backslashes being removed, you can use string.rstrip()

For example:

x = '\abc\'
print x.rstrip('\')

prints:

abc

But there is a slight problem with this (based on how your question is worded): This will strip ALL trailing backslashes. If you really only want the LAST character to be stripped, you can do something like this:

if x[-1] == '\': x = x[:-1]
Answered By: Adam Batkin

The rstrip function will remove more than just the last character, though. It will remove all backslashes from the end of the string. Here’s a simple if statement that will remove just the last character:

if s[-1] == '\':
    s = s[:-1]
Answered By: EdoDodo

Or not so beautiful(don’t beat me) but also works:

stripSlash = lambda strVal: strVal[:-1] if strVal.endswith('\') else strVal
stripSlash('sample string with slash\')

And yes – rstrip is better. Just want to try.

Answered By: Artsiom Rudzenka
if s.endswith('\'):
    s = s[:-1]
Answered By: Matt Joiner

If you only want to remove one backslash in the case of multiple, do something like:

s = s[:-1] if s.endswith('\') else s
Answered By: Rob Cowie

We can use built-in function replace

my_str.replace(my_char,”)

my_chars = '\'    
my_str = my_str.replace(my_char,'')

This will replace all in my_str

my_str.replace(my_chars, ”,i)

my_char = '\'
my_str = 'ABCDEFGHIJKL'
print ("Original my_str : "+ my_str)
for i in range(8):
    print ("Replace '\' %s times" %(i))
    print("     Result : "+my_str.replace(my_chars, '',i))

This will replace in my_str i times
Now you can control how many times you want to replace it with i

Output:

Original my_str : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 0 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 1 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 2 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 3 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 4 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 5 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 6 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Replace '' 7 times
     Result : ABCDEFGHIJKL
Answered By: AnuragChauhan

For C# people who end up here:

my_string = my_string.TrimEnd('\');
Answered By: Shadi Alnamrouti
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