Remove first word from string if length is 1

Question

I want to remove the first character in a string, and the white space after it, only if the first word is one character.

Like this:

input = "A fish"
output = "fish"

Is there a way to do this without turning it into a list first?

Answer 1

You can do this with indexing:

def remove_first(s):
    if len(s) < 2:
        return s
    # if string is letter then a space then trim the first 2 chars
    if s[0].isalpha() and s[1].isspace():
        return s[2:]
    return s

remove_first("A fish") # "fish"
remove_first("fish") # "fish"