How To Delete Text In Python

In this tutorial, we will learn how to delete text or characters from a given string in Python. Python’s string-handling capabilities make this task extremely easy. We will explore a few different methods to achieve this goal, including slicing, regular expressions, and string methods.

Step 1: Slicing the string

One way to delete characters from a string is to use slicing. Slicing takes two indices and creates a new substring with the characters between those indices.

Here’s the basic syntax for slicing a string:

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new_string = original_string[start:stop]

Suppose we want to delete the first three characters of a string:

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original_string = "Hello, World!"
new_string = original_string[3:]
print(new_string)
 
lo, World!

Here, we have sliced the string starting at index 3 and continuing until the end of the string, effectively removing the first three characters.

Step 2: Using regular expressions

Another method to delete text in Python is by using the re module, Python’s regular expressions library.

In this example, we will remove all non-digits characters from a string:

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import re
 
original_string = "Phone: 123-456-7890"
new_string = re.sub(r'\D', '', original_string)
print(new_string)
 
1234567890

Here, we used the re.sub function with the pattern \D to match any non-digit character and replace them with an empty string.

Step 3: Using string methods

Python has a lot of built-in string methods that are useful for manipulating text. We can use these methods to delete certain characters or patterns from a string. In the following example, we will remove all whitespace characters from a string:

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original_string = "Hello, World! How are you?"
new_string = original_string.replace(' ', '')
print(new_string)
 
Hello,World!Howareyou?

In this example, we used the replace method to replace all spaces with an empty string.

Full code:

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# Slicing
original_string = "Hello, World!"
new_string = original_string[3:]
print(new_string)
 
# Using regular expressions
import re
 
original_string = "Phone: 123-456-7890"
new_string = re.sub(r'\D', '', original_string)
print(new_string)
 
# Using string methods
original_string = "Hello, World! How are you?"
new_string = original_string.replace(' ', '')
print(new_string)

Conclusion:

In this tutorial, we have seen different methods to delete text from a string in Python, such as slicing, using regular expressions, and using built-in string methods. Depending on the specific problem, you might want to use one of these methods or even combine them for more advanced text manipulation.