3

I'm trying to delete the last character of a string, and every documentation I can find says that this works.

string = 'test'
string[:-1]
print(string)

However, whenever I try it, my IDE tells me that line two has no effect, and when I run the code it outputs "test" and not "tes", which is what I want it to do. I think that the documentation I'm reading is about python 2 and not 3, because I don't understand why else this simple code wouldn't work. Can someone show me how to remove the last letter of a string in python 3?

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    string = string[:-1] Do this. Commented Nov 21, 2018 at 7:39

1 Answer 1

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7 
new_string = string[:-1]
print(new_string)

You must save the string in the memory. When we assign a variable to the string without the last character, the variable then "stores" the new value. Thus we can print it out.

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2 Comments

This demonstrates the correct code, but doesn't explain any of the why. Try expanding on this answer to mention that strings are immutable, that string slicing creates a new object and doesn't modify an existing one, etc.
If you want to see changes in string after altering it , you have to assign alteration of string in same string or another string.Thats why we do string = string[:-1]

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