Deleting a Character from a String in Python

Strings in Python are immutable sequences of characters, unlike C-strings, which are terminated by a null character. Therefore, removing a character from a string in Python requires creating a new string.

Removing Specific Character Instances

To remove all instances of a specific character from a string, the replace() method can be used:

newstr = oldstr.replace("character", "")

For instance, to remove all occurrences of the letter "M" from the string "EXAMPLE", the following code can be used:

newstr = "EXAMPLE".replace("M", "")

Removing a Character at a Specific Index

If the goal is to remove the character at a specific index, a new string can be created by concatenating the portions of the original string before and after the index to be removed:

midlen = len(oldstr) // 2
newstr = oldstr[:midlen]   oldstr[midlen   1:]

This approach avoids shifting the characters to the left or right.

Additional Considerations

Unlike in C, strings in Python are not stored with a termination character. Therefore, any value, including the null character (\0), can appear within a Python string. This is important to keep in mind when manipulating strings in Python.