Question

While I know that there is the possibility:

>>> a = "abc"
>>> result = a[-1]
>>> a = a[:-1]

Now I also know that strings are immutable and therefore something like this:

>>> a.pop()
c

is not possible.

But is this really the preferred way?

Answer 1

Strings are “immutable” for good reason: It really saves a lot of headaches, more often than you’d think. It also allows python to be very smart about optimizing their use. If you want to process your string in increments, you can pull out part of it with split() or separate it into two parts using indices:

a = "abc"
a, result = a[:-1], a[-1]

This shows that you’re splitting your string in two. If you’ll be examining every byte of the string, you can iterate over it (in reverse, if you wish):

for result in reversed(a):
    ...

I should add this seems a little contrived: Your string is more likely to have some separator, and then you’ll use split:

ans = "foo,blah,etc."
for a in ans.split(","):
    ...