I often find myself in a need of stripping only a specified amount of characters from a string (most commonly a single character). I have been implementing this in an ad-hoc manner, which is quite inelegant: def rstrip1(txt, chars): if txt is None: return None elif any(txt.endswith(c) for c in chars): return txt[:-1] else: return txt I would appreciate if str.split, str.lstrip, str.rsplit functions had a `maxstrip` argument, similar to the `maxsplit` argument of `str.split`, which would specify the maximum count of characters to be removed from the string. In case of `str.split` this maximum would apply to each side of the string separately. Am I the only one who is surprised such functionality is not implemented already??