I find that when I'm normalizing strings, I end up writing this a lot: sites = ['www.google.com', 'http://python.org', 'www.yahoo.com'] new_sites = [] for site in sites: if site.startswith('http://'): site = site[len('http://'):] new_sites.append(site) But it'd be much nicer if I could use a convenience function trim that would do this for me, so I could just use a comprehension: def ltrim(s, prefix): if s.startswith(prefix): return s[len(prefix):] return s sites = ['www.google.com', 'http://python.org', 'www.yahoo.com'] sites = [ltrim(site, 'http://') for site in sites] Would there be any interest to add this helper function, as well as an "rtrim" and "trim", to the str class? -e