I'm using this to remove spaces and special characters and convert characters to lowercase:
''.join(e for e in artistName if e.isalnum()).lower()
I want to:
replace spaces with -
if the string starts with the word the, then it
So that, for instance, The beatles music! would become beatles-music.
artistName = artistName.replace(' ', '-').lower()
if artistName.startswith('the-'):
artistName = artistName[4:]
artistName = ''.join(e for e in artistName if e.isalnum() or e == '-')
...startswith('the-') would be better; an artist may be named theodore ;-)It sounds like you want to make a machine readable slug. Using a library for this function will save you lots of headache. python-slugify does what you are asking for and a bunch of other things you might not have even thought of.
Starting in Python 3.9, you can also use removeprefix:
'The beatles music'.replace(' ', '-').lower().removeprefix('the-')
# 'beatles-music'
This would be best done with a bunch of regex-es so you can easily add to it over time.
Not sure of the python syntax but if it was perl you'd do something like:
s/^The //g; #remove leading "The "
s/\s/-/g; #replace whitespaces with dashes
It looks like python has a nice little howto for regexes: http://docs.python.org/howto/regex.html
