Question

When we need to slice a string at a particular location, we need to know the index from where we want to.

For example, in the string:

>>> s = 'Your ID number is: 41233'

I want to slice the string starting from : and get the number.

Sure I can count at what index : is and then slice, but is that really a good approach?

Of course I can do a s.index(':'). But that would be an extra step, so I came up with something like:

>>> print s[(s.index(':')+2):]
41233

But somehow I don’t like the looks of it.

So my question is, given a long string which you want to slice, how do you find the index from where to begin the slicing in the easiest and most readable way? If there is a trick to do it orally, I would love to know that.

Answer 1

Perhaps you could use split():

>>> s = 'Your ID number is: 41233'
>>> print s.split(":")[1].strip()
41233