Remove the first word in a Python string?

Question

What\'s the quickest/cleanest way to remove the first word of a string? I know I can use split and then iterate on the array to get my string. But I\'m pretty s

Answer 1

A naive solution would be:

text = "funny cheese shop"
print text.partition(' ')[2] # cheese shop

However, that won't work in the following (admittedly contrived) example:

text = "Hi,nice people"
print text.partition(' ')[2] # people

To handle this, you're going to need regular expressions:

import re
print re.sub(r'^\W*\w+\W*', '', text)

More generally, it's impossible to answer a question involving "word" without knowing which natural language we're talking about. How many words is "J'ai"? How about "中华人民共和国"?