The .split method on strings splits at whitespace by 
default, but takes an optional argument allowing 
splitting by other strings. The .strip method (and its 
siblings), on the other hand, always strip whitespace. 
On more than one occasion I would have found it useful 
if these methods also took an optional argument 
allowing other strings to be stripped. For example, to 
strip, say, asterisks from a string you could do:

>>>fred = '**word**word**'
>>>fred.strip('*')
word**word

If nothing else, this would meany that we have a good 
answer when people ask about a equivalent to 
Perl's 'chomp' function - string.rstrip(os.linesep).

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why is string.replace() not sufficient?

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string.replace doesn't do the same thing. With our 
hypothetical .strip argument, we have:

>>>fred = '**word**word**' 
>>>fred.strip('*') 
word**word

Using replace, we have:

>>>fred = '**word**word**' 
>>>fred.replace('*', '') 
wordword 

See the difference?

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FYI, this has already been rejected once as patch #424606.

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Closing, since this has already been rejected by the BDFL.

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Reopened. A good use case is str(2**100).rstrip('L').

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So what happens to patch http://www.python.org/sf/424606

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Oops, I saw your remark too late.

I've checked in my own version of this for regular
strings...

Feel free to check in your version of this for Unicode
strings, and the docs etc.

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(I'd say this is a good reason not to use separate trackers
for features, bugs, & patches -- they're too closely related
to keep them separate, and links between them too tedious
when written only in tracker comments!)

I've updated the documentation for these methods in
Doc/lib/libstdtypes.tex revision 1.87.

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I have a patch ready that implements the unicode version, 
and the mixed versions, i.e. str.strip(unicode) and 
unicode.strip(str), but CVS doesn't like me today.

Maybe tomorrow!

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Here is the patch (diff.txt).

This a simple copy of the string version. I had to make the 
unicode version of do_xstrip public (as _PyUnicode_XStrip), 
so that the string version can call it when it gets passed 
a unicode object.

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Walter, please check this in. I haven't reviewed it
thoroughly, but it looks okay, and the functionality is
right.

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OK, checked in as:

Doc/lib/libstring.tex 1.46
Include/unicodeobject.h 2.37
test/string_tests.py 1.15
test/test_unicode.py 1.57
Objects/stringobject.c 2.160
Objects/unicodeobject.c 2.144

Backport will follow.

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Backported to the release22-maint branch as:

Doc/lib/libstring.tex 1.45.8.1
Include/unicodeobject.h 2.36.10.1
Lib/test/string_tests.py 1.10.16.3
Lib/test/test_unicode.py 1.47.6.3
Objects/stringobject.c 2.147.6.3
Objects/unicodeobject.c 2.124.6.8