How to remove last character of a string

Question

I have many lines similar to

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|          |"

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|HHH|" 

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|III|          |"

I want to remove last pipe and spaces from such lines which contains extra |

my required output is

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|"

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|HHH|" 

"HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|III|"

I have tried for 1 string but the problem is this also eliminates the spaces present inside that string.

A=  "HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|          |"
Y=A.split()
print(Y)

final=[]

if Y[-1]=='~':
    ab=Y[:-1]
    cd=''.join(ab)
    print(cd)
else:
    ef=''.join(Y)
    print(ef)

Answer 1

use a regex with 1 or more spaces then a pipe then end of line.

your_string = re.sub("\s+\|$","",your_string)

testing:

>>> your_string = "HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|          |"
>>> re.sub("\s+\|$","",your_string)
'HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|'
>>> your_string = "HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|"
>>> re.sub("\s+\|$","",your_string)
'HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|'

Answer 2

I would use a regex replacement here:

inp = "HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|          |"
output = re.sub(r'(?<=\|)\s*\|$', '', inp)
print(output)  # HHH |**** XYzz| *ABC*hgg|G~GG|G|HJJ|JJJ|

The regex pattern used here says to match:

(?<=\|)  assert that last pipe separated column is empty
\s*      match zero or more whitespace characters
\|       match final pipe
$        end of the input

The lookbehind (?<=\|) ensures that we don't strip away the final pipe for something like this:

|ABC|DEF|GHI     |

In this case, the spaces are part of the data and the last element is not empty.