The string is popular data and variable type of Python. There are different operations about the string type where removing the last character from the string is one of them. There are different ways to remove the last character from the string in Python. The last character from a string can be removed for different reasons like removing unnecessary data, format string into a specific way, etc.
Remove Last Character From String with Positive Slicing
Python string type is a list of characters and in order to remove the last character, we just need to remove the last item from the list. Converting a variable into the list and working item by item is called slicing. We will use list slicing to remove the last item. The square brackets are used to define list items and inside them, the index of the items can be specified. First, we get the length of the list that returns item counts. Then we remove the last character by setting the end index before the last character.
name="pythontecT"
name_len = len(name)
new_name = name[:name_len-1]
print(new_name)The output is like below where the last character “T” is removed.
pythontec
Remove Last Character From String with Negative Slicing
As stated previously slicing can be used to remove the last character from the string. We have used positive slicing in the previous part and the alternative slicing way is negative slicing. Actually, negative slicing is easier to implement and understand. There is no need to calculate and use the string length. For negative slicing, we just provide the end index number as -1. The negative index numbers are used to start from the reverse. Simply -1 means the index before the last character index.
name="pythontecT"
new_name = name[:-1]
print(new_name)Remove Last Character From String with rstip() Method
Python provides the rstrip() method or function in order to strip character from the right side of the string. The right side of the string is the end of the string and this means the rstrip() can be used to remove the last character from the provided string. The rstrip() is provided by every string type. The rstrip() method requires the character we want to remove where we should provide the last character of the string with the negative index -1.
name="pythontecT"
new_name = name.rstrip(name[-1])
print(new_name)Remove Last Character From String with regex
Regular Expression or Regex is used to define and match character and text partterns. Regex provides a lot of useful specifiers where some of them is end of line, multiple characters etc. These can se used to remove last character from the string. In order to work with regex the re module should imported and the sub() method is used to make substitution with the provided regex pattern.
import re
def another_group(m):
return m.group(1)
name="pythontecT"
new_name = re.sub("(.*)(.{1}$)",another_group,name)
print(new_name)