I have a list of string – ‘starting-list’. The last letters in the elements represents a value. And the other part represent a name. I want to create a list with the unique names.

I can’t use ‘-‘ as split in any straight forward way because it’s not always the last one. The position of the spliting ‘-‘ varies from case to case.

One idea I have is to find the elements that matches in the beginning. And then remove the part that is not the same for all elements. But I can’t figure out how do perform this in code.

Any ideas?

starting_list = ['XX-VAL1',
             'XX-VAL-2', 
             'OPP-VAL-1', 
             'OPP-VAL2', 
             'O-PP-VAL1',
              'O-PP-VAL2',
               'O-PP-VAL3' 
               'PO-VAL1', 
               'PO-L-VAL-1',
                'PO-L-VAL2',
                'RUI-O-VAL1',
                'RUI-A-VAL1',
                'RUI-O-VAL2',
                'RUI-A-VAL2',]

target_list = ['XX', 'OPP', 'O-PP', 'PO', 'RUI-A', 'RUI-B']