Why split and strip gives different output in python?

Question

I was trying to extract the state name from the string 'Rhode Island[edit]'.

When I tried .split('[[]').str[0], I was given the correct result 'Rhode Island'. However, when I tried .rstrip('[edit]'), I was given the wrong result 'Rhode Islan'.

I got confused why the character 'd' before the left bracket was also removed when I used rstrip function.

The parameter to `rstrip()` is "*a string specifying the set of characters to be removed.*". Read the documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=rstrip#str.rstrip — cdarke, Nov 17 '16 at 06:41
`'Rhode Island[edit]'.split('[[]').str[0]` is going to produce `AttributeError`; please verify that part of your question. — Jim Stewart, Nov 17 '16 at 06:42

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 17 '16 at 06:42

3

rstrip doesn't do what you want, it removes all characters specified from the end of the string, so it removed '[', 'e', 'd', 'i', 't', and ']'. What you want is to split on '[' then take the first element: 'Rhode Island[edit]'.split('[')[0]

answered Nov 17 '16 at 06:42

yelsayed

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 17 '16 at 06:48

S.rstrip([chars]) -> string or unicode

Return a copy of the string S with trailing whitespace removed. If chars is given and not None, remove characters in chars instead. If chars is unicode, S will be converted to unicode before stripping

in your case the chars = ['[','e','d','i','t',']'] which contains 'd' there fore trailing string that formed by given chars is d[edit]

try regular expression

import re
re.compile(r'\[edit\]$').sub('','Rhode Island[edit]')

Using `re` is the best approach since it reveals the intent. — Jim Stewart, Nov 17 '16 at 06:48

Why split and strip gives different output in python?

2 Answers2