How can I remove everything in a string until a character(s) are seen in Python

Question

Say I have a string and I want to remove the rest of the string before or after certain characters are seen

For example, all my strings have 'egg' in them:

"have an egg please"
"my eggs are good"

I want to get:

"egg please"
"eggs are good"

and also the same question but how can I delete all but the string in front of the characters?

Answer 1

You can use str.find method with a simple indexing :

>>> s="have an egg please"
>>> s[s.find('egg'):]
'egg please'

Note that str.find will returns -1 if it doesn't find the sub string and will returns the last character of your string.So if you are not sure that always your string is contain the sub string you better to check the value of str.find before using it.

>>> def slicer(my_str,sub):
...   index=my_str.find(sub)
...   if index !=-1 :
...         return my_str[index:] 
...   else :
...         raise Exception('Sub string not found!')
... 
>>> 
>>> slicer(s,'egg')
'egg please'
>>> slicer(s,'apple')
Sub string not found!

Answer 2

string = 'Stack Overflow'
index = string.find('Over') #stores the index of a substring or char
string[:index] #returns the chars before the seen char or substring

Hence, the output will be

'Stack '

and

string[index:]

will give

'Overflow'

Answer 3

You can use str.join() and str.partition():

''.join('have an egg please'.partition('egg')[1:])