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"?

Answer 2

The other answer will raise an exception if your string only has one word, which I presume is not what you want.

One way to do this instead is to use the str.partition function.

>>> s = "foo bar baz"
>>> first, _, rest = s.partition(" ")
>>> rest or first
'bar baz'

>>> s = "foo"
>>> first, _, rest = s.partition(" ")
>>> rest or first
'foo'

Answer 3

Presuming you can guarantee the words are separated by a single space, str.partition() is what you are looking for.

>>> test = "word1 word2 word3"
>>> test.partition(" ")
('word1', ' ', 'word2 word3')

The third item in the tuple is the part you want.

Answer 4

I think the best way is to split, but limit it to only one split by providing maxsplit parameter:

>>> s = 'word1 word2 word3'
>>> s.split(' ', 1)
['word1', 'word2 word3']
>>> s.split(' ', 1)[1]
'word2 word3'