Remove the first word in a Python string?

I think the best way is to split, but limit it to only one split by providing maxsplit parameter:

>>> s = 'word1 word2 word3'
>>> s.split(' ', 1)
['word1', 'word2 word3']
>>> s.split(' ', 1)[1]
'word2 word3'

A naive solution would be:

text = "funny cheese shop"
print text.partition(' ')[2] # cheese shop

However, that won't work in the following (admittedly contrived) example:

text = "Hi,nice people"
print text.partition(' ')[2] # people

To handle this, you're going to need regular expressions:

import re
print re.sub(r'^\W*\w+\W*', '', text)

More generally, it's impossible to answer a question involving "word" without knowing which natural language we're talking about. How many words is "J'ai"? How about "中华人民共和国"?

The other answer will raise an exception if your string only has one word, which I presume is not what you want.

One way to do this instead is to use the str.partition function.

>>> s = "foo bar baz"
>>> first, _, rest = s.partition(" ")
>>> rest or first
'bar baz'

>>> s = "foo"
>>> first, _, rest = s.partition(" ")
>>> rest or first
'foo'

Presuming you can guarantee the words are separated by a single space, str.partition() is what you are looking for.

>>> test = "word1 word2 word3"
>>> test.partition(" ")
('word1', ' ', 'word2 word3')

The third item in the tuple is the part you want.