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pythonliststrip

Strip number characters from start of string in list

my_list = ['1. John',
 '2. James',
 '3. Mark',
 '4. Mary',
 '5. Helen',
 '6. David']

I would like to remove the number that is a string, the "." and the white space before the name.

for i in my_list:
  i.lstrip(". ")

I was hoping the output would be a list as such:

mylist = ['John', 
  'James',
  'Mark', 
  'Mary',
  'Helen',
  'David']
Solution

  • If you really want to use strip, you can try:

    my_list = ['1. John', '2. James', '3. Mark', '4. Mary', '5. Helen', '6. David']
name_list = [item.lstrip('1234567890. ') for item in my_list]

    Or as @Michael Butscher mentioned, to retrieve the name part you can simply use split to split the string by space into two part ['1.', 'John'] and retrieve the last part:

    name_list= [item.split(' ')[-1] for item in my_list]

    Result: ['John', 'James', 'Mark', 'Mary', 'Helen', 'David']