How to Remove the First Character From a String in Python?

Are you struggling in python to remove the first character from a string? Congratulations 💐, you have landed at the right place. 

Just like other programming languages, strings refer to arrays of bytes used for representing Unicode characters in Python. You might already know that python does not have any data type for characters. An individual character is considered a string that must have a minimum length equal to 1.

In this article, we’ll discuss various solutions in Python to remove the first character from a string using python. 🥳. In Python, we’ve various solutions to remove the first or any character from a string, we’ll discuss the following in this article:

1. Remove the First Character From String Using Slicing.
2. Remove the first character from the string using regex. 
3. Remove the first character from the string using str.Istrip() function.
4. Removing the first n character from the string using slicing.

Remove The First Character From a String Using Slicing

In Python, slicing is a fast way of accessing parts of the data you want. Using Python, one can slice a string and choose the character’s range of their choice. One can use slicing as follows: 

Test[starting index: ending index]

Here, you can see the starting and ending index. They are index positions. This expression will help us in returning the original string and the new string as well.

The default values for these indexes are 0 and N. But if we want to display the original string, we will pass it null without assigning any indexes. Let’s understand using the example below:

Code

# strings

test1 = "Testing"

test = "Testing"



# show the original string without removing any character

test1 = test[ : ]



# Slice the string to remove the first character

test = test[1 : ]



# print the result

print(test1)

print(test)

Output

Testing

esting

In the above example, we have created a string and passed it into a slice function. In the end, we printed the original array and the other one after removing the first character.

Remove The First Character From a String Using Regex 

We can remove the first character from the string using the regex sub-function. In regex, its sub-function can be written as re.sub(). This function matches the string’s given pattern and replaces that character with the replacement string. One can use the regex function as stated below:

test = re.sub("^.", "", test)

This method will help in choosing the first character from the string and replacing it with the other defined string character, which is empty. In the end, it will return a new string that contains the remaining characters.

Let’s understand it better with an example. :

Code

# import regular expression

import re



# create string

test = "First Character"



# remove the first character using the regex sub-function

test = re.sub("^.", "", test)

print(test)

Output

irst Character

In the above example, we removed the string’s first character using the regex sub() function.

Remove The First Character From a String Using str.Istrip() Function

The str.Istrip() function in python removes the first character from the string. Apart from this, it also removes repetitive characters from the string if the character occurs at the beginning of the string. 

Let’s see an example in Python to remove the first character from a string using str.Istrip():

Code

# here we only removed the first character of the string

original_string = "hello world"

new_string = original_string.lstrip("h")



# print the result

print(new_string)



# here we have removed the first character which is repetitive

original_string = "hhhhhhello world"

new_string = original_string.lstrip("h")



# print the result

print(new_string)

Output 

ello world

ello world

In the above example, you can see we have printed two results. In both results, we removed the first character, but the only difference is that all the repetitive characters were removed in the second result.

Conclusion

To summarise the article, we have discussed how to remove the first character from the string using various approaches. Furthermore, we’ve provided multiple solutions to remove the first character from the string and also provided a solution to remove the n characters from the string.

Here is a quick recap of the topics discussed in the article:

1. What are strings?
2. How to remove the first character of the string using slicing in Python?
3. How to remove the first character of the string using regex?
4. How to remove the first character of the string using str.Istrip() function?
5. How to remove n characters from the string using slicing?

If you find this article helpful, do share it with your friends 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 and let us know in the comment section below 👇 which solution is more convenient for you 🥰.

Happy Coding!