Can Dictionaries be used to remove a number of characters from the start of a string Python?

Question

I'm currently carrying out work on the formatting of Ireland Phone Numbers. There's a number of different characters that need to be removed from the beginning. This is a small sample of the code. I'm wondering if there is another method to carry this out like a dictionary so that it is [353:3, 00353:5, 0353:4...] and it slices the beginning based on the length of the matched string? Thanks in advance.

if s.startswith("353") == True:
    s = s[3:]
if s.startswith("00353") == True:
    s = s[5:]
if s.startswith("0353") == True:
    s = s[4:] 
if s.startswith("00") == True:
    s = s[2:]    

Answer 1

You could do something like this and replace the start with an empty string if found.

s = "00353541635351651651"

def remove_prefix(string):
    starters = ["353", "00353", "0353", "00"]
    for start in starters:
        if string.startswith(start):
            return string.replace(start, "")

print(remove_prefix(s))

Answer 2

If these are mutually exclusive, you can use a regular expression to check for them all at once. You can also combine similar patterns, eg 353 , 0353 , 00353 can be combined by matching a number of 0 followed by 353 .

import re

s = re.sub(r'^(0{0,2}353|00)', '', s)