How can we strip punctuation at the start of a string using Python?

Question

I want to strip all kinds of punctuation at the start of the string using Python. My list contains strings and some of them starting with some kind of punct

Answer 1

To remove punctuation, spaces, numbers from the beginning of each string in a list of strings:

import string

chars = string.punctuation + string.whitespace + string.digits    
a[:] = [s.lstrip(chars) for s in a]

Note: it doesn't take into account non-ascii punctuation, whitespace, or digits.