I was actually thinking about this before the recent "string comprehension" thread. I wasn't really going to post the idea, but it's similar enough that I am nudged to. Moreover, since PEP 616 added str.removeprefix() and str.removesuffix(), this feels like a natural extension of that.

I find myself very often wanting to remove several substrings of similar lines to get at "the good bits" for my purpose. Log files are a good example of this, but it arises in lots of other contexts I encounter. Let's take a not-absurd hypothetical:

GET [http://example.com/picture] 200 image/jpeg

POST [http://nowhere.org/data] 200 application/json

PUT [https://example.org/page] 200 text/html

For each of these lines, I'd like to see the URL and the MIME type only. The new str.removeprefix() helps some, but not as much as I would like since the "remove a tuple of prefixes" idea was rejected for PEP 616. But even past that, very often much of what I want to remove is in the middle, not at the start or the end.

I know I can use regular expressions here. However, they are definitely a higher cognitive burden, and especially so for those who haven't taught them and written about them a lot, as I have. Even for me, I'd rather not think about regexen if I don't have to. So probably I'll do something like this:

for line in lines:

for noise in ('GET', 'POST', 'PUT', '200', '[', ']'):

line = line.replace(noise, '')

process_line(line)

That's not horrible, but it would be nicer to write:

for line in lines:

process_line(line.remove(('GET', 'POST', 'PUT', '200', '[', ']'))

Of course, if I really needed this as much as I seem to be suggesting, I know how to write a function `remove_strings()`... and I confess I have not done that. Or at least I haven't done it in some standard "my_utils" module I always import. Nonetheless, a string method would feel even more natural than a function taking the string as an argument.

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