What's the most Pythonic way to remove a number from start of a string?

Question

I have various strings

123_dog 2_fish 56_cat 45_cat_fish

There is always one number. Always a '_' after the number.

I need to remove the number and the underscore. I can use regex, but I wonder if there is some pythonic way that uses builtin methods?

(I'm an experienced coder - but new to Python.)

Answer 1

Assuming that there is always an underscore after the number, and that there is always exactly a single number, you can do this:

s = '45_cat_fish'
print s.split('_', 1)[1]
# >>> cat_fish

The argument to split specifies the maximum number of splits to perform.

Answer 2

Using split and join:

>>> a="45_cat_fish"
>>> '_'.join(a.split('_')[1:])
'cat_fish'

Edit: split can take a maxsplit argument (see YS-L answer), so '_'.join is unnecessary, a.split('_',1)[1] …

---

Using find

>>> a[a.find('_')+1:]
'cat_fish'

Answer 3

Another way is:

s = "45_cat_fish"
print ''.join(c for c in s if c.isalpha() or c == '_')[1:]

gives cat_fish