replacing last part of string after pattern

Question

What is the best way to remove the last bit of a string, following a certain recognized pattern? For example:

s = 'some Strings-and-stuff - SomeOther Strings-and-stuff - TAke.THis last -part away.txt'

will return:

'some Strings-and-stuff - SomeOther Strings-and-stuff'

when operated on by some function which looks for the pattern '-' and removes the last string after the last ' - ' occurs.

EDIT: The answer was given to be:

new_string = ' - '.join(s.split(' - ')[0:-1])

Other things I tried:

>>> re.sub(r'(.*) - ', '', s[::-1])[::-1]
'some Strings-and-stuff'

Using the suggested .split() function, I can get the output by this:

>>> p = s.split(' - ')
>>> p.pop()
'TAke.THis last -part away.txt'
>>> ' - '.join(p)
'some Strings-and-stuff - SomeOther Strings-and-stuff'

It works, but the other suggested answer is a better way to get rid of the non one liner pop() or del function.

He actually wants two of those parts after the hyphen to be removed. @chase I guess you'd have to provide what kind of pattern you want to remove in order for me to suggest a regular expression for that. — Alagappan Ramu
– Alagappan Ramu, Commented May 6, 2013 at 18:32
Sorry the pattern to recognize is '` - ' with a space on either side of the -. Everything past the last ' - `' is deleted. — chase
– chase, Commented May 6, 2013 at 18:34

Alagappan Ramu · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-06 18:42:05Z

2

This would give you the desired result in a single line:

s = " - ".join(s.split(' - ')[:-1])

answered May 6, 2013 at 18:42

Alagappan Ramu

2,3697 gold badges27 silver badges38 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Ryan Saxe · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-06 18:37:38Z

2

you want to use split for this!

In [130]: s = 'some Strings-and-stuff - SomeOther Strings-and-stuff - TAke.THis last -part away.txt'

In [131]: s.split(" - ")[0:-1]
Out[131]: ['some Strings-and-stuff', 'SomeOther Strings-and-stuff']

when you split by " - " it will return a list that has items that would have been separated in the string by " - ".

Then you index from the first item until the last item, which is why there is [0:-1] after the split

answered May 6, 2013 at 18:37

Ryan Saxe

17.9k23 gold badges85 silver badges130 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

replacing last part of string after pattern

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related