Well, from the docstring of strip: ------ S.strip([chars]) -> string or unicode
Return a copy of the string S with leading and trailing whitespace removed. If chars is given and not None, remove characters in chars instead. If chars is unicode, S will be converted to unicode before stripping ------ In this case 'http://thunder'.strip('http://') is the same as 'http://thunder'.strip('htp:/') and any character of the string that is passed to the method will be removed. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
