Remove the first character of a string

I would like to remove the first character of a string.

For example, my string starts with a : and I want to remove that only. There are several occurrences of : in the string that shouldn't be removed.

I am writing my code in Python.


python 2.x

s = ":dfa:sif:e"
print s[1:]

python 3.x

s = ":dfa:sif:e"
print(s[1:])

both prints

dfa:sif:e

Your problem seems unclear. You say you want to remove "a character from a certain position" then go on to say you want to remove a particular character.

If you only need to remove the first character you would do:

s = ":dfa:sif:e"
fixed = s[1:]

If you want to remove a character at a particular position, you would do:

s = ":dfa:sif:e"
fixed = s[0:pos]+s[pos+1:]

If you need to remove a particular character, say ':', the first time it is encountered in a string then you would do:

s = ":dfa:sif:e"
fixed = ''.join(s.split(':', 1))

Depending on the structure of the string, you can use lstrip:

str = str.lstrip(':')

But this would remove all colons at the beginning, i.e. if you have ::foo, the result would be foo. But this function is helpful if you also have strings that do not start with a colon and you don't want to remove the first character then.


Just do this:

r = "hello"
r = r[1:]
print(r) # ello