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pythonstringliststartswith

How to remove a string from a list that startswith prefix in python

I have this list of strings and some prefixes. I want to remove all the strings from the list that start with any of these prefixes. I tried:

prefixes = ('hello', 'bye')
list = ['hi', 'helloyou', 'holla', 'byeyou', 'hellooooo']
for word in list:
    list.remove(word.startswith(prexixes)

So I want my new list to be:

list = ['hi', 'holla']

but I get this error:

ValueError: list.remove(x): x not in list

What's going wrong?

Solution

  • Greg's solution is definitely more Pythonic, but in your original code, you perhaps meant something like this. Observe that we make a copy (using list[:] syntax) and iterate over the copy, because you should not modify a list while iterating over it.

    prefixes = ('hello', 'bye')
list = ['hi', 'helloyou', 'holla', 'byeyou', 'hellooooo']
for word in list[:]:
    if word.startswith(prefixes):
        list.remove(word)
print list