Keyboard shortcut with delete in it

Feels like I'm spamming because I've mentioned the same app in 2 consecutive posts, I promise I don't work for them or get any benefit!

That said, I use TextExpander rather than the built-in replacements in OS X. I have a couple of my "snippets" that I want a similar result, eliminating a leading space. The way I've done it is to include the leading space in my key sequence, e.g. "{space}like" is replaced by ", like". OS X's built-in replacement won't allow spaces in the phrase to be replaced, but TextExpander will.

If it's not always a leading space, i.e. you want the last character before your substitution deleted no matter what that character is, I think you could accomplish that in TextExpander also, through scripting. TE supports AppleScript, Bash, Perl, etc. scripts as part of its substitutions - but I've not had to go there for my needs.