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

You can use strip():

Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters removed. The chars argument is a string specifying the set of characters to be removed.

Passing string.punctuation will remove all leading and trailing punctuation chars:

>>> import string
>>> string.punctuation
'!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'

>>> l = [',,gets', 'gets,,', ',,gets,,']
>>> for item in l:
...     print item.strip(string.punctuation)
... 
gets
gets
gets

Or, lstrip() if you need only leading characters removed, rstip() - for trailing characters.

Hope that helps.