Using startswith() with strings formatting operators

Question

I have the following bits of code:

name = "Axe"
vowels = ["a","e","i","o","u"]    

if %s.startswith(vowels) % (name):    #name will be input from users
    print "sth"
else:
    ....

Here, I try to use the startswith function with strings formatting operators but it didn't work. I also tried with the {} format, but it still gives me a syntax error. Am I doing something wrong or this isn't possible? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

It's a little unclear from your code exactly what you mean to do, but this works:

>>> ("%s" % 'hi').startswith('h')
True

So I think that the problem is that you have to first format your string and then do .startswith(). Also I don't think that startswith accepts arrays as an argument so you would have to do something like

if True in map(lambda x: ("%s" % name).startswith(x), vowels):
    # do something

And furthermore if you want to ignore case you would do:

if True in map(lambda x: ("%s" % name).lower().startswith(x), vowels):
    # do something

Hope this helps!