Remove a prefix from a string

For Python 3.9+:

text.removeprefix(prefix)

For older versions, the following provides the same behavior:

def remove_prefix(text, prefix):
    if text.startswith(prefix):
        return text[len(prefix):]
    return text

What about this (a bit late):

def remove_prefix(s, prefix):
    return s[len(prefix):] if s.startswith(prefix) else s

I think you can use methods of the str type to do this. There's no need for regular expressions:

def remove_prefix(text, prefix):
    if text.startswith(prefix): # only modify the text if it starts with the prefix
         text = text.replace(prefix, "", 1) # remove one instance of prefix
    return text

regex solution (The best way is the solution by @Elazar this is just for fun)

import re
def remove_prefix(text, prefix):
    return re.sub(r'^{0}'.format(re.escape(prefix)), '', text)

>>> print remove_prefix('template.extensions', 'template.')
extensions