How can we strip punctuation at the start of a string using Python?

Question

I want to strip all kinds of punctuation at the start of the string using Python. My list contains strings and some of them starting with some kind of punct

Answer 1

for each_string in list:
    each_string.lstrip(',./";:') #you can put all kinds of characters that you want to ignore.

Answer 2

strip() when used without parameters strips only spaces. If you want to strip any other character, you need to pass it as a parameter to strip function. In your case you should be doing

a[i]=a[i].strip(',')

Answer 3

Assuming you want to remove all punctuation regardless of where it occurs in a list containing strings (which may contain multiple words), this should work:

test1 = ",,gets"
test2 = ",,gets,,"
test3 = ",,this is a sentence and it has commas, and many other punctuations!!"
test4 = [" ", "junk1", ",,gets", "simple", 90234, "234"]
test5 = "word1 word2 word3 word4 902344"

import string

remove_l = string.punctuation + " " + "1234567890"

for t in [test1, test2, test3, test4, test5]:
    if isinstance(t, str):
        print " ".join([x.strip(remove_l) for x in t.split()])
    else:
        print [x.strip(remove_l) for x in t \
               if isinstance(x, str) and len(x.strip(remove_l))]

Answer 4

If you want to remove it only from the begining, try this:

    import re
    s='"gets'
    re.sub(r'("|,,)(.*)',r'\2',s)

Answer 5

To remove punctuation, spaces, numbers from the beginning of each string in a list of strings:

import string

chars = string.punctuation + string.whitespace + string.digits    
a[:] = [s.lstrip(chars) for s in a]

Note: it doesn't take into account non-ascii punctuation, whitespace, or digits.

Answer 6

Pass the characters you want to remove in lstrip and rstrip

'..foo..'.lstrip('.').rstrip('.') == 'foo'