I have some sample string. How can I replace first occurrence of this string in a longer string with empty string?
regex = re.compile('text')
match = regex.match(url)
if match:
url = url.replace(regex, '')
2 Answers
string replace() function perfectly solves this problem:
string.replace(s, old, new[, maxreplace])
Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. If the optional argument maxreplace is given, the first maxreplace occurrences are replaced.
>>> u'longlongTESTstringTEST'.replace('TEST', '?', 1)
u'longlong?stringTEST'
Use re.sub directly, this allows you to specify a count:
regex.sub('', url, 1)
(Note that the order of arguments is replacement, original not the opposite, as might be suspected.)
