Python Remove last char from string and return it

Strings are “immutable” for good reason: It really saves a lot of headaches, more often than you’d think. It also allows python to be very smart about optimizing their use. If you want to process your string in increments, you can pull out part of it with split() or separate it into two parts using indices:

a = "abc"
a, result = a[:-1], a[-1]

This shows that you’re splitting your string in two. If you’ll be examining every byte of the string, you can iterate over it (in reverse, if you wish):

for result in reversed(a):
    ...

I should add this seems a little contrived: Your string is more likely to have some separator, and then you’ll use split:

ans = "foo,blah,etc."
for a in ans.split(","):
    ...