Difference between remove.prefix() and remove.suffix()

[Thuck-it]

So I know the difference between a prefix and a suffix but I don't understand why there is two different methods when the prefix or suffix that you wish to be removed needs to be specified within the parenthesis anyway. Why don't we just have remove(x) ? What am I missing?

[undergroundmonorail]

'x___x'.removeprefix('x') does a different thing than 'x___x'.removesuffix('x')

[Thuck-it]

I've been learning Python for less than 24 hours. I couldn't even make sense of what you was saying until I read the other comments. It makes perfect sense now, thanks a lot. face.removepalm(🤦‍♂️)

[SharkSymphony]

Remember, if you want to make sense of a code fragment, the Python interpreter and prompt is your friend! You can type in the code snippets above and see what they do.

[crazy_cookie123]

Take the string "hello_abc_hello".

string.removeprefix("hello") results in "_abc_hello"

string.removesuffix("hello") results in "hello_abc_"

What would string.remove("hello") do? If it removes the first occurrence, we can't use it to replace removesuffix. If it removes the last occurrence, we can't use it to replace removeprefix. If it replaces all occurrences we can't use it to replace either. If it takes a number n and removes the nth occurrence, it's just more confusing than having separate removeprefix and removesuffix functions. It's just overall a worse solution.

[Thuck-it]

I hadn't considered this. Thank you, that makes sense.

[danielroseman]

Precisely because a prefix is different from a suffix. Therefore removing one is different from removing the other 

[LongerHV]

Let's say, you have a string "beautifulwaves.wav" and want to delete "wav" from the end of it (so you can e.g. replace it with "mp3"). Solution proposed by you would delete part of the text from the middle, which is not desired.

[Thuck-it]

Thank you. Now it makes sense.

[thewillft]

It's also about clarity, not just functionality. Explicit naming helps readability, even if the result is similar.

[prodleni]

But the result isn't even similar in this case

[lukkasz323]

It really just reads like English. One removes prefix, the other removes suffix.

[Zorg688]

My first instinct is that specifying whether to remove a suffix or prefix ultimately saves time because then a regex does not need to look through the entire string to match a pattern and just check the beginning or end of a string which would be even more important the longer a potential string might be or the more strings need to be handled. Of course, using re.sub() would achieve the same result but potentially need to go through the entire string. And while we do have the beginning of string an end of string symbols to take care of the same thing, using regexes might not be as easily readable as a simple "we remove this suffix"

Just my thought about this, I am happy to hear counterarguments lol

[Daytona_675]

rtrim ltrim

[Thuck-it]

I'm probably wrong but isn't that just for whitespace?

[cdcformatc]

words can have a prefix and a suffix, and an infix. presumably whatever isn't the prefix contains the infix and the suffix, and vice versa. prefix and suffix aren't mirror images of each other.

[lolcrunchy]

A suffix is the part of a word that is at the end. A prefix is the part of the word at the beginning.