[Python-ideas] New explicit methods to trim strings

Anders Hovmöller boxed at killingar.net
Tue Mar 26 10:18:39 EDT 2019


> 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".

I think

    re.sub("^" + re.escape(x), '', s)

is a lot more messy and hard to read than

    s[len(prefix):] if s.startswith(prefix) else s 

it's also roughly an order of magnitude slower.


/ Anders

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20190326/a6ae3fbb/attachment.html>


More information about the Python-ideas mailing list