On 15-03-10, Ethan Furman wrote:

On 03/10/2015 10:57 AM, Isaac Schwabacher wrote:

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On 15-03-10, Facundo Batista wrote:

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On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:27 PM, lou xiao wrote:

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tiny➜ ~ python Python 2.7.5+ (default, Feb 27 2014, 19:37:08) [GCC 4.8.1] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

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> a='device_info' > a.lstrip('device') '_info' > a.lstrip('device_') 'nfo'

On one hand, this is the "development of python itself" list; this issue was more aimed to the general python list, of you was sure that this is a real bug, to the issue tracker.

On the other hand, this is not a bug! If you pass a parameter to lstrip it will (quoted from its help) "remove characters in chars instead.", so the moment you pass "device_", it removes all those characers from the left... note that the 'i' is removed twice.

That said, I bet this is the most common string-munging operations that *isn't* available as a single function in the stdlib. I know my bash code is full of ${filename%.suffix} and such, and the fact that in python I have to either import re or resort to some combination of (starts|ends)with, r?partition, slicing and an if-clause makes that sort of code much more verbose and harder to read. Pathlib's Path.with_suffix helps in some but not all of these cases. Maybe the stdlib should have a simple way to do this? It could even be added as a kwarg (exact=False) to str.[lr]strip to minimize the effect on the API; alternatively it could be str.strip(prefix|suffix).

Nice way to bring it on-topic!

And yes, that would be nice.

Yes. When you are converting a code base from bash to python, you *really* don't want python to push back.

-- ~Ethan~