[Python-ideas] New explicit methods to trim strings

[David Mertz]

The only reason I would support the idea would be to allow multiple
suffixes (or prefixes). Otherwise, it just does too little for a new
method. But adding that capability of startswith/endswith makes the cut off
something easy to get wrong and non-trivial to implement.

That said, I really like Brandt's ideas of expanding the signature of
.lstrip/.rstrip instead.

mystring.rstrip("abcd") # remove any of these single character suffixes

mystring.rstrip(('foo', 'bar', 'baz')) # remove any of these suffixes

Yes, the semantics or removals where one is a substring of another would
need to be decided. As long as it's documented, any behavior would be fine.
Most of the time the issue would be moot.

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019, 4:36 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 04:48:36PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
> > Regardless of the method name, IMO the functions should accept a tuple
> > of test strings, as startswith/endwith do. That's a feature that can't
> > easily be spelled in a one-liner. (Though stacked suffixes shouldn't
> > all be removed - "asdf.jpg.png".cutsuffix((".jpg", ".png")) should
> > return "asdf.jpg", not "asdf".)
>
> There's a slight problem with that: what happens if more than one suffix
> matches? E.g. given:
>
>     "musical".lcut(('al', 'ical'))
>
> should the suffix "al" be removed, leaving "music"? (First match wins.)
>
> Or should the suffix "ical" be removed, leaving "mus"? (Longest match
> wins.)
>
> I don't think we can decide which is better, and I'm not keen on a
> keyword argument to choose one or the other, so I suggest we stick to
> the 90% solution of only supporting a single suffix.
>
> We can always revisit that in the future.
>
>
> --
> Steven
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