String manipulation in Python

Question

I have this very ugly piece of code which runs ethtool and then parses the output (Lilex is just a static class encapsulating subprocess and is not relevant to the question. I'm looking for someone to suggestions to shorten the string manipulation.

 bash_command = "/sbin/ethtool -P " + identifier
 output = Lilex.execute_command(bash_command)
 mac_address = str(output)
 mac_address = mac_address.replace("Permanent address: ", "")
 mac_address = mac_address.replace("\\n", "")
 mac_address = mac_address.replace("'", "")
 mac_address = mac_address[1:].strip()

This is example output that is produced by ethtool -P:

Permanent address: 12:af:37:d0:a9:c8

I'm not sure why I'm replacing single quotes with nothing, but I'm sure I've seen the command output single quotes before, so that part needs to stay.

An alternative suggestion (which is actually not much different):

mac_address = mac_address \
 .split(":")[1]\
 .replace("\\n","") \
 .replace("'","") \
 .strip()

• QuantumChris: the string module has lots of fantastic methods for stuff like this. Otherwise you could look into regex.

Answer 1

How about this?

mac_address = mac_address[19:].translate(str.maketrans("", "", "\n':")).strip()