.strip not working in python

Question

I don't really understand the .strip function.

Say I have a string

xxx = 'hello, world'

and I want to strip the comma. Why doesn't

print xxx.strip(',')

work?

Answer 1

str.strip() removes characters from the start and end of a string only. From the str.strip() documentation:

Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters removed.

Emphasis mine.

Use str.replace() to remove text from everywhere in the string:

xxx.replace(',', '')

For a set of characters use a regular expression:

import re

re.sub(r'[,!?]', '', xxx)

Demo:

>>> xxx = 'hello, world'
>>> xxx.replace(',', '')
'hello world'