On 31Dec2015 18:38, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
On 2015-12-31 18:18, otaksoftspamt...@gmail.com wrote:
I need to check a string over which I have no control for the first 2 non-white
space characters (which should be '[{').
The string would ideally be: '[{...' but could also be something like
' [ { ....'.
Best to use re and how? Something else?
I would use .split and then ''.join:
''.join(' [ { ....'.split())
'[{....'
This presumes it is ok to drop/mangle/lose the whitespace elsewhere in the
string. If it contains quoted text I'd expect that to be very bad.
It might be faster if you provide a maximum for the number of splits:
''.join(' [ { ....'.split(None, 1))
'[{ ....'
Not to mention safer.
I would use lstrip and startswith:
s = lstrip(s)
if s.startswith('['):
s = s[1:].lstrip()
if s.startswith('{'):
... deal with s[1:] here ...
It is wordier, but far more basic and direct.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au>
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