In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove the last occurrence of a character from a string in Python with the help of some examples.
How to remove the last instance of a character in a string?

Strings are immutable in Python. That is, they cannot be modified after they are created. You can, however, create a copy of the original string with the last occurrence of the character removed.
Use the following steps –
- Find the index of the last occurrence of the character in the string.
- For this, first, reverse the string and find the first index of the character in the reversed string.
- Then, subtract this index and one from the length of the string to get the last index of the character in the original string.
- Then, use the above index to slice the original string such that the character at that index is skipped.
Let’s look at an example –
# create a string s = "not me, not her" # get index of last occurrence of 'n' rev_s = s[::-1] i = len(s) - rev_s.index('n') - 1 # remove the character at index i in s print(s[:i]+s[i+1:])
Output:
not me, ot her
You can see that the output string does not contain the last occurrence of the character ‘n’ from the original string. Also, notice that the other occurrences of the character ‘n’ in the string are unaffected.
For more on the Python string index() function, refer to its documentation.
Using a Loop to remove the last occurrence of character in String
Alternatively, you can also use a loop to iterate through the characters of the original string from the right and remove the last occurrence of a character from a string in Python. Use the following steps –
Introductory ⭐
- Harvard University Data Science: Learn R Basics for Data Science
- Standford University Data Science: Introduction to Machine Learning
- UC Davis Data Science: Learn SQL Basics for Data Science
- IBM Data Science: Professional Certificate in Data Science
- IBM Data Analysis: Professional Certificate in Data Analytics
- Google Data Analysis: Professional Certificate in Data Analytics
- IBM Data Science: Professional Certificate in Python Data Science
- IBM Data Engineering Fundamentals: Python Basics for Data Science
Intermediate ⭐⭐⭐
- Harvard University Learning Python for Data Science: Introduction to Data Science with Python
- Harvard University Computer Science Courses: Using Python for Research
- IBM Python Data Science: Visualizing Data with Python
- DeepLearning.AI Data Science and Machine Learning: Deep Learning Specialization
Advanced ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- UC San Diego Data Science: Python for Data Science
- UC San Diego Data Science: Probability and Statistics in Data Science using Python
- Google Data Analysis: Professional Certificate in Advanced Data Analytics
- MIT Statistics and Data Science: Machine Learning with Python - from Linear Models to Deep Learning
- MIT Statistics and Data Science: MicroMasters® Program in Statistics and Data Science
🔎 Find Data Science Programs 👨💻 111,889 already enrolled
Disclaimer: Data Science Parichay is reader supported. When you purchase a course through a link on this site, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Earned commissions help support this website and its team of writers.
- Create an empty string to store our result and a flag set to
False
to determine whether we have encountered the character that we want to remove. - Iterate through each character in the string from the right.
- For each character, check if it’s equal to the character we want to remove and whether the flag is
False
. If both the conditions are true, set the flag toTrue
and skip over to the next iteration. Else, add the character to our result string. - Reverse the result string to get our original string with the last instance of the character removed.
Let’s look at an example –
# create a string s = "not me, not her" result = "" ch_to_remove = 'n' occurred_flag = False # iterate over each character in s from right for ch in s[::-1]: if ch == ch_to_remove and occurred_flag == False: occurred_flag = True continue else: result += ch # reverse the result result = result[::-1] # display the resulting string print(result)
Output:
not me, ot her
We get the same result as above. The resulting string has the last instance of the character removed. Note that this method is too lengthy as compared to the previous method.
You might also be interested in –
- Python – Remove First Occurrence of Character in String
- Python – Remove the Last Word From String
- Python – Remove Last N Characters From String
- Remove Last Character From String in Python
Subscribe to our newsletter for more informative guides and tutorials.
We do not spam and you can opt out any time.