Replace first occurrence of string in Python

I have some sample string. How can I replace first occurrence of this string in a longer string with empty string?

regex = re.compile('text')
match = regex.match(url)
if match:
    url = url.replace(regex, '')

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

string replace() function perfectly solves this problem:

string.replace(s, old, new[, maxreplace])

Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. If the optional argument maxreplace is given, the first maxreplace occurrences are replaced.

>>> u'longlongTESTstringTEST'.replace('TEST', '?', 1)
u'longlong?stringTEST'

Method 2

Use re.sub directly, this allows you to specify a count:

regex.sub('', url, 1)

(Note that the order of arguments is replacement, original not the opposite, as might be suspected.)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0