Remove Last Character From String in Python

Python strings come with a number of useful methods and techniques to help you with string manipulation. In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove the last character from a string in Python with the help of some examples.

How to remove the final character of a string?

The simplest way to remove the last character from a string is to slice the string from the first character to the second last character. To slice a string, s from index i to index j (but not including the character at index j), you can use the notation s[i:j].

Strings (and other iterables) in Python are indexed starting from 0. This means that the last character in the string is present at the index len(s) - 1. Let’s now use the two indices to slice the string.

# create a string
s = "Boomerang"
# remove the last character
s[0:len(s)-1]

Output:

'Boomeran'

You can see that the resulting string has the last character from the original string removed. When slicing from the start of the string, you don’t need to explicitly specify the starting index in the slice.

# remove the last character
s[:len(s)-1]

Output:

'Boomeran'

We get the same result as above.

Iterables like strings, lists, etc. in Python work with both positive and negative indexes. The negative index starts from the end of the iterable. For example, item at index -1 is the last item in the iterable, item at the -2 is the second last item and so on.

You can use the -1 index to get the last character in the string.

# create a string
s = "Boomerang"
# the last character
s[-1]

Output:

'g'

We can use this index in the slice to remove the last character from the string.

# create a string
s = "Boomerang"
# remove the last character
s[:-1]

Output:

'Boomeran'

We get the same result as above. Here we slice the string from the start till the last character (but not including it).

There are other methods as well to remove the last character from a string in Python. For example, you can use the string rstrip() function which by default removes trailing whitespace characters but can be modified to remove any character from the end of a string. Pass the character or the characters to be removed from the end of the string as an argument.

# create a string
s = "Boomerang"
# remove the last character
s.rstrip(s[-1])

Output:

'Boomeran'

We get the string with the last character removed. Here we pass the last character in s, s[-1] as an argument to the rstrip() function to indicate that we want to remove this specific character from the end of the string.