How to replace multiple substrings of a string?

Question

I would like to use the .replace function to replace multiple strings.

I currently have

string.replace("condition1", "")

but would like to have something like

string.replace("condition1", "").replace("condition2", "text")

although that does not feel like good syntax

what is the proper way to do this? kind of like how in grep/regex you can do \1 and \2 to replace fields to certain search strings

Answer 1

Why not one solution like this?

s = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
for r in (("brown", "red"), ("lazy", "quick")):
    s = s.replace(*r)

#output will be:  The quick red fox jumps over the quick dog

Answer 2

This is just a more concise recap of F.J and MiniQuark great answers. All you need to achieve multiple simultaneous string replacements is the following function:

def multiple_replace(string, rep_dict):
    pattern = re.compile("|".join([re.escape(k) for k in sorted(rep_dict,key=len,reverse=True)]), flags=re.DOTALL)
    return pattern.sub(lambda x: rep_dict[x.group(0)], string)

Usage:

>>>multiple_replace("Do you like cafe? No, I prefer tea.", {'cafe':'tea', 'tea':'cafe', 'like':'prefer'})
'Do you prefer tea? No, I prefer cafe.'

If you wish, you can make your own dedicated replacement functions starting from this simpler one.

Answer 3

I would like to propose the usage of string templates. Just place the string to be replaced in a dictionary and all is set! Example from docs.python.org

>>> from string import Template
>>> s = Template('$who likes $what')
>>> s.substitute(who='tim', what='kung pao')
'tim likes kung pao'
>>> d = dict(who='tim')
>>> Template('Give $who $100').substitute(d)
Traceback (most recent call last):
[...]
ValueError: Invalid placeholder in string: line 1, col 10
>>> Template('$who likes $what').substitute(d)
Traceback (most recent call last):
[...]
KeyError: 'what'
>>> Template('$who likes $what').safe_substitute(d)
'tim likes $what'

Answer 4

You should really not do it this way, but I just find it way too cool:

>>> replacements = {'cond1':'text1', 'cond2':'text2'}
>>> cmd = 'answer = s'
>>> for k,v in replacements.iteritems():
>>>     cmd += ".replace(%s, %s)" %(k,v)
>>> exec(cmd)

Now, answer is the result of all the replacements in turn

again, this is very hacky and is not something that you should be using regularly. But it's just nice to know that you can do something like this if you ever need to.

Answer 5

Here's a sample which is more efficient on long strings with many small replacements.

source = "Here is foo, it does moo!"

replacements = {
    'is': 'was', # replace 'is' with 'was'
    'does': 'did',
    '!': '?'
}

def replace(source, replacements):
    finder = re.compile("|".join(re.escape(k) for k in replacements.keys())) # matches every string we want replaced
    result = []
    pos = 0
    while True:
        match = finder.search(source, pos)
        if match:
            # cut off the part up until match
            result.append(source[pos : match.start()])
            # cut off the matched part and replace it in place
            result.append(replacements[source[match.start() : match.end()]])
            pos = match.end()
        else:
            # the rest after the last match
            result.append(source[pos:])
            break
    return "".join(result)

print replace(source, replacements)

The point is in avoiding many concatenations of long strings. We chop the source string to fragments, replacing some of the fragments as we form the list, and then join the whole thing back into a string.

Answer 6

Here is a short example that should do the trick with regular expressions:

import re

rep = {"condition1": "", "condition2": "text"} # define desired replacements here

# use these three lines to do the replacement
rep = dict((re.escape(k), v) for k, v in rep.iteritems())
pattern = re.compile("|".join(rep.keys()))
text = pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], text)

For example:

>>> pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], "(condition1) and --condition2--")
'() and --text--'