Re: [Python-ideas] New explicit methods to trim strings

And this really is simple enough that I don't want to reach for regex's for it. That is, I'd write it by hand rather than mess with that.

Well, with re.escape it's not messy at all : import re def trim_mailto(s): regex = re.compile("^" + re.escape("mailto:")) return regex.sub('', s) With literally means "if you have mailto: at the beginning, replace it with the empty string" You could do a ltrim function in one line : def ltrim(s, x): return re.sub("^" + re.escape(x), '', s) Escape will take care of escaping special characters, so the regex escape(x) matches exactly the string "x".