Python lists have nifty indexing/slicing capabilities. Here are several examples:

x = "123456"

x[:-3]
'123'

x[:-1]
'12345'  # -1 slices off last element

x[:-0]  # -0 slices off .. everything .. this is what i'd like to fix
''

I would like to slice off a variable number of elements d:

x[:-d]

But if d were 0 we get a much different result than desired. A workaround is:

d = 0
x[:-d if d else len(x)]
'123456'

That is possible - but is there any [shorter] alternative?