How to remove first occurrence of a letter?

Question

I know how to remove the first occurrence of a letter using splicing, but I'm trying to achieve this without using any of the string functions like splicing, .find(), .count(), etc. I can't seem to figure out how you complete it without splicing.

Here's what I currently have with splicing that works correctly:

s1 = ''
s2 = len(remWord)
for i in range(s2):
    if (remWord[i] == remLetter):
        s1 = remWord[0:i] + remWord[i + 1:s2]
return s1

Any assistance would be great.

Answer 1

I am assuming that you do not remove anything if the letter is not contained in the string, so you can use the following code:

Strictly not using splicing

new_string = ''
found = False

for i in range(len(remWord)):
    if remWord[i] != remLetter or found:
        new_string += remWord[i]
    else:
        found = True

If you are allowed to use splicing

new_string = ''

for i in range(len(remWord)):
    if remWord[i] != remLetter:
        new_string += remWord[i]
    else:
        break

new_string += remWord[i + 1:]

Answer 2

You should stop the processing as soon as you encounter the first letter, use a break for this purpose.

remWord = 'this is the word to process'
remLetter = 's'
s1 = ''
s2 = len(remWord)
for i in range(s2):
    if (remWord[i] == remLetter):
        s1 = remWord[0:i] + remWord[i + 1:s2]
        break
print s1

output:

$ python firstletter.py 
thi is the word to process

If you omit the break, your output will be like this

$ python firstletter.py 
this is the word to proces

As the if clause will be satisfied for the last encounter of the remLetter present in your input string