How do I get a substring of a string in Python?

Question

Is there a way to substring a string in Python, to get a new string from the third character to the end of the string?

Maybe like myString[2:end]?

Answer 1

I would like to add two points to the discussion:

1. You can use None instead on an empty space to specify "from the start" or "to the end":

   'abcde'[2:None] == 'abcde'[2:] == 'cde'
   

   This is particularly helpful in functions, where you can't provide an empty space as an argument:

   def substring(s, start, end):
       """Remove `start` characters from the beginning and `end` 
       characters from the end of string `s`.
   
       Examples
       --------
       >>> substring('abcde', 0, 3)
       'abc'
       >>> substring('abcde', 1, None)
       'bcde'
       """
       return s[start:end]
   

2. Python has slice objects:

   idx = slice(2, None)
   'abcde'[idx] == 'abcde'[2:] == 'cde'