How do I remove the last character from a string?
"abcdefghij" → "abcdefghi"
7 Answers
Simple:
my_str = "abcdefghij"
my_str = my_str[:-1]
Try the following code snippet to better understand how it works by casting the string as a list:
str1 = "abcdefghij"
list1 = list(str1)
print(list1)
list2 = list1[:-1]
print(list2)
In case, you want to accept the string from the user:
str1 = input("Enter :")
list1 = list(str1)
print(list1)
list2 = list1[:-1]
print(list2)
To make it take away the last word from a sentence (with words separated by whitespace like space):
str1 = input("Enter :")
list1 = str1.split()
print(list1)
list2 = list1[:-1]
print(list2)
5 Comments
Cyrille
Yes,
st[-1] is only the last character of st
kindall
Actually that slice will still work even if
st is empty. Well, it will return an empty string still, but you won't get an error.
Jellyse
What if you have a list of words and you want to delete the last character of every word? [blue, red, green] => [blu,re,gree] ?
Cyrille
[i[:-1] for i in ['blue','red','green']]
Dmitry
Looking at the examples, it is worth to mention that lists are mutable and that
list.pop() method is the way to go when dealing with lists, as it removes the last item in place O(1), while [:-1] slicing creates a copy of a list without the last element in O(n-1) time plus O(n-1) space. Strings are immutable - so nothing to add.What you are trying to do is an extension of string slicing in Python:
Say all strings are of length 10, last char to be removed:
>>> st[:9]
'abcdefghi'
To remove last N characters:
>>> N = 3
>>> st[:-N]
'abcdefg'
Comments
Using slicing, one can specify the start and stop indexes to extract part of a string s. The format is s[start:stop]. However, start = 0 by default. So, we only need to specify stop.
Using stop = 3:
>>> s = "abcd"
>>> s[:3]
'abc'
Using stop = -1 to remove 1 character from the end (BEST METHOD):
>>> s = "abcd"
>>> s[:-1]
'abc'
Using stop = len(s) - 1:
>>> s = "abcd"
>>> s[:len(s) - 1]
'abc'
2 Comments
tripleee
This merely seems to restate the earlier answers.
Mateen Ulhaq
@tripleee Perhaps, but the only well-written answer is Anshul Goyal's, and even that doesn't directly describe that the basic slicing syntax takes the form (
start:stop), which also solves the question "How do I remove the first N characters from a string?". For a newcomer, I imagine that [:-1] looks like unexplained magic. Lastly, this answer also gives some indication of how :-1 corresponds to :len(s) - 1.The simplest solution for you is using string slicing.
Python 2/3:
source[0: -1] # gets all string but not last char
Python 2:
source = 'ABC'
result = "{}{}".format({source[0: -1], 'D')
print(result) # ABD
Python 3:
source = 'ABC'
result = f"{source[0: -1]}D"
print(result) # ABD
Comments
This also removes the last character in the string:
alphabets = 'abcdefgh'
print(alphabets[:-1])
The [:-1] slices the last character specified in the -1. Hence the output is abcdefg (slicing h).
Comments
input_str = "abcdefghij"
output_str = ''.join(input_str.rsplit(input_str[-1], 1))
print(output_str) # Output: "abcdefghi"
In this method, input_str.rsplit(input_str[-1], 1) splits the string at the last occurrence of the last character, resulting in a list of substrings. Then, ''.join() concatenates those substrings back into a single string without the last character. The resulting string is stored in output_str.
This approach may be useful if you want to remove only the last occurrence of a specific character from the string, rather than removing the very last character in general.
Comments
So there is a function called rstrip() for stuff like this. You enter the value you want to delete, in this case last element so string[-1] :
string = "AbCdEf"
newString = string.rstrip(string[-1])
print(newString)
If you runt his code you shouul see the 'f' value is deleted.
OUTPUT: AbCdE
1 Comment
tripleee
This will strip more than one character from "abcdeff"
my_str[:-1]from the answers in the dup link seems a bit of a jump. As the linked site appears RIGHT NOW (see thelynxcommand), it's hard to find.$ lynx -dump https://web.archive.org/web/20200826203245/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/663171/how-do-i-get-a-substring-of-a-string-in-python | grep -n "\[[:][-]1\]"\n540:print(a[:-1])\n542:In the above code, [:-1] declares to print from the starting till the\n 548: `Note: Here a [:-1] is also the same as a [0:-1] and a [0:len(a)-1][:-2]for removing the last two characters of a string. I believe it should be not too hard for any programmer to infer that[:-1]can then be used to remove only the final character.