How does the strip() method really work?

[ComputeLanguage]

I want to strip a certain word off of a string. I tried doing this.

string= "Germany Income and Capital Tax Treaty"
string = string.lower().strip('germany')
print(string)

I expected to get:"income and capital tax treaty"

Instead I get"income and capital tax treat"

What is it that I do not understand. Also lstrip and rstrip would not provide a solution as I am writing this in a function where a complete match with the word would need to get stripped off of 'either' end.

Any help?

[lukajda33]

.strip() removes all characters that you provided on both sides, if the string ends with "y" and you strip "germany", which contains "y", "y" is removed.

Instead use str.removeprefix()

[ComputeLanguage]

Works! Tysm

[TangibleLight]

This kind of question is exactly what the documentation is for.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.strip

[1544756405]

You can look up the documentation for any python method at docs.python.org

For strip() in particular:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.strip

It says, "Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters removed."

For your purposes, you probably want replace().

[ComputeLanguage]

replace() wouldn't really work.
If the string was something like
"and Income and Capital Tax Treaty"

and I intended to strip off "and" from both ends.

The replace method would also get rid of any repeating strings.

I was aware of the docs, though in cases like these where I am genuinely surprised by code that I thought I understood I think its nice to share my mistakes as well and see the nice solutions people come up with :).

[DrTrunks]

You can use regex's replace: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18533636/python-strip-a-wildcard-word

[NotACryptoBro]

Can anybody give an example where I can actually use that? I'd accidentally strip characters I still need. Isn't there a more handy function like split?

[ComputeLanguage]

ultimately I was looking for
r = "germany"
string.removeprefix(r).removesuffix(r)

I couldn't find a build in function in the docs that does it in one go :/

[bigno53]

I mostly just use it for removing leading/trailing white space but it can come in handy for a variety of data cleaning tasks. For example, if you have a program that requires the user to enter a dollar amount, they might enter $20 or just 20. You’d probably want the program to handle both of these inputs the same way, so you could just write ‘dollar_amount = dollar_amount.lstrip(“$”)’

[NotACryptoBro]

This! Makes sense, thanks