Finding whether a string starts with one of a list's variable-length prefixes

Question

I need to find out whether a name starts with any of a list\'s prefixes and then remove it, like:

if name[:2] in [\"i_\", \"c_\", \"m_\", \"l_\", \"d_\", \"t         


        

Answer 1

Could use a simple regex.

import re
prefixes = ("i_", "c_", "longer_")
re.sub(r'^(%s)' % '|'.join(prefixes), '', name)

Or if anything preceding an underscore is a valid prefix:

name.split('_', 1)[-1]

This removes any number of characters before the first underscore.