Remove Arbitrary Leading Character From A Python String With .lstrip()

Passing a string of characters to `.lstrip()`` will remove those characters from the start of the string being operated on. For example:

Code

alfa = f"""  a  b  a

x a charlie"""

stripped = alfa.lstrip("ab \n")

print(f"START|{stripped}|END")

Results

START|x a charlie|END

This example passes a string with four characters to `.lstrip()`: "a", "b", " " (space), and "\n" (newline)
Any number of the given characters in any different combination are removed
As soon as a character that's not in the argument is seen, no further removal is done (hence the single "a" character in the example above remaining since it's behind the "x"
See also .removeprefix() for how to remove a specific string instead of a set of characters