Question

I want to chop off last character if it is lower case and second last one is upper case. For example.

14-ME -> 14-ME
MEA  -> MEA
MEAm -> MEA  #like this one
mama -> mama

How to write the regx ? I am thinking of something like r”(.+?)” but not sure how to do conditional thing on the last part. The word could have anything like ()-,+ too.

thanks

Answer 1

Don’t really need a regex to do this when you can write a simple piece of code to do it.

def chop_char(some_string):
    try:
        # determine if the second to last character is upper case
        if some_string[-2].istitle() and not some_string[-1].istitle():
            return some_string[:-1] # slice off the last character
    except IndexError:
        # string isn't long enough to have a 2nd to last char (i.e. it's only 1 character)
        pass
    return some_string

Or if you don’t want the exception stuff…

def chop_char(s):
    if len(s) > 1:
        if s[-2].istitle() and not s[-1].istitle():
            return s[:-1]
    return s