Most Pythonic was to strip all non-alphanumeric leading characters from string

Question

For example

!@#123myname --> myname
!@#yourname!@#123 --> yourname!@#123

There are plenty of S.O. examples of \"most pythonic ways of re

Answer 1

You could use a regex matching non-alphanumeric chars at the start of the string:

s = '!@#myname!!'
r = re.compile(r"^\W+") # \W non-alphanumeric at start ^ of string

Output:

In [28]: r = re.compile(r"^\W+")  
In [29]: r.sub("",'!@#myname')
Out[29]: 'myname'    
In [30]: r.sub("",'!@#yourname!@#')
Out[30]: 'yourname!@#'

\W+ will keep underscores so to just keep letters and digits at the start we can:

s = '!@#_myname!!'
r = re.compile(r"^[^A-Za-z0-9]+") 

print(r.sub("",s))
myname!!

If you want to just remove up to the first letter:

r = re.compile(r"^[^A-Za-z]+")