Finding whether a string starts with one of a list's variable-length prefixes

Question

I need to find out whether a name starts with any of a list\'s prefixes and then remove it, like:

if name[:2] in [\"i_\", \"c_\", \"m_\", \"l_\", \"d_\", \"t         


        

Answer 1

import re

def make_multi_prefix_replacer(prefixes):
    if isinstance(prefixes,str):
        prefixes = prefixes.split()
    prefixes.sort(key = len, reverse=True)
    pat = r'\b(%s)' % "|".join(map(re.escape, prefixes))
    print 'regex patern :',repr(pat),'\n'
    def suber(x, reg = re.compile(pat)):
        return reg.sub('',x)
    return suber



pfxs = "x ya foobar yaku foo a|b z."
replacer = make_multi_prefix_replacer(pfxs)               

names = "xenon yadda yeti yakute food foob foobarre foo a|b a b z.yx zebra".split()
for name in names:
    print repr(name),'\n',repr(replacer(name)),'\n'

ss = 'the yakute xenon is a|bcdf in the barfoobaratu foobarii'
print '\n',repr(ss),'\n',repr(replacer(ss)),'\n'