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

I don't know about speed but this is my workaday quick fix:

reduce(lambda a, b: a.replace(*b)
    , [('o','W'), ('t','X')] #iterable of pairs: (oldval, newval)
    , 'tomato' #The string from which to replace values
    )

... but I like the #1 regex answer above. Note - if one new value is a substring of another one then the operation is not commutative.

Answer 2

Here my $0.02. It is based on Andrew Clark's answer, just a little bit clearer, and it also covers the case when a string to replace is a substring of another string to replace (longer string wins)

def multireplace(string, replacements):
    """
    Given a string and a replacement map, it returns the replaced string.

    :param str string: string to execute replacements on
    :param dict replacements: replacement dictionary {value to find: value to replace}
    :rtype: str

    """
    # Place longer ones first to keep shorter substrings from matching
    # where the longer ones should take place
    # For instance given the replacements {'ab': 'AB', 'abc': 'ABC'} against 
    # the string 'hey abc', it should produce 'hey ABC' and not 'hey ABc'
    substrs = sorted(replacements, key=len, reverse=True)

    # Create a big OR regex that matches any of the substrings to replace
    regexp = re.compile('|'.join(map(re.escape, substrs)))

    # For each match, look up the new string in the replacements
    return regexp.sub(lambda match: replacements[match.group(0)], string)

It is in this this gist, feel free to modify it if you have any proposal.

Answer 3

I needed a solution where the strings to be replaced can be a regular expressions, for example to help in normalizing a long text by replacing multiple whitespace characters with a single one. Building on a chain of answers from others, including MiniQuark and mmj, this is what I came up with:

def multiple_replace(string, reps, re_flags = 0):
    """ Transforms string, replacing keys from re_str_dict with values.
    reps: dictionary, or list of key-value pairs (to enforce ordering;
          earlier items have higher priority).
          Keys are used as regular expressions.
    re_flags: interpretation of regular expressions, such as re.DOTALL
    """
    if isinstance(reps, dict):
        reps = reps.items()
    pattern = re.compile("|".join("(?P<_%d>%s)" % (i, re_str[0])
                                  for i, re_str in enumerate(reps)),
                         re_flags)
    return pattern.sub(lambda x: reps[int(x.lastgroup[1:])][1], string)

It works for the examples given in other answers, for example:

>>> multiple_replace("(condition1) and --condition2--",
...                  {"condition1": "", "condition2": "text"})
'() and --text--'

>>> multiple_replace('hello, world', {'hello' : 'goodbye', 'world' : 'earth'})
'goodbye, earth'

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

The main thing for me is that you can use regular expressions as well, for example to replace whole words only, or to normalize white space:

>>> s = "I don't want to change this name:\n  Philip II of Spain"
>>> re_str_dict = {r'\bI\b': 'You', r'[\n\t ]+': ' '}
>>> multiple_replace(s, re_str_dict)
"You don't want to change this name: Philip II of Spain"

If you want to use the dictionary keys as normal strings, you can escape those before calling multiple_replace using e.g. this function:

def escape_keys(d):
    """ transform dictionary d by applying re.escape to the keys """
    return dict((re.escape(k), v) for k, v in d.items())

>>> multiple_replace(s, escape_keys(re_str_dict))
"I don't want to change this name:\n  Philip II of Spain"

The following function can help in finding erroneous regular expressions among your dictionary keys (since the error message from multiple_replace isn't very telling):

def check_re_list(re_list):
    """ Checks if each regular expression in list is well-formed. """
    for i, e in enumerate(re_list):
        try:
            re.compile(e)
        except (TypeError, re.error):
            print("Invalid regular expression string "
                  "at position {}: '{}'".format(i, e))

>>> check_re_list(re_str_dict.keys())

Note that it does not chain the replacements, instead performs them simultaneously. This makes it more efficient without constraining what it can do. To mimic the effect of chaining, you may just need to add more string-replacement pairs and ensure the expected ordering of the pairs:

>>> multiple_replace("button", {"but": "mut", "mutton": "lamb"})
'mutton'
>>> multiple_replace("button", [("button", "lamb"),
...                             ("but", "mut"), ("mutton", "lamb")])
'lamb'

Answer 4

I built this upon F.J.s excellent answer:

import re

def multiple_replacer(*key_values):
    replace_dict = dict(key_values)
    replacement_function = lambda match: replace_dict[match.group(0)]
    pattern = re.compile("|".join([re.escape(k) for k, v in key_values]), re.M)
    return lambda string: pattern.sub(replacement_function, string)

def multiple_replace(string, *key_values):
    return multiple_replacer(*key_values)(string)

One shot usage:

>>> replacements = (u"café", u"tea"), (u"tea", u"café"), (u"like", u"love")
>>> print multiple_replace(u"Do you like café? No, I prefer tea.", *replacements)
Do you love tea? No, I prefer café.

Note that since replacement is done in just one pass, "café" changes to "tea", but it does not change back to "café".

If you need to do the same replacement many times, you can create a replacement function easily:

>>> my_escaper = multiple_replacer(('"','\\"'), ('\t', '\\t'))
>>> many_many_strings = (u'This text will be escaped by "my_escaper"',
                       u'Does this work?\tYes it does',
                       u'And can we span\nmultiple lines?\t"Yes\twe\tcan!"')
>>> for line in many_many_strings:
...     print my_escaper(line)
... 
This text will be escaped by \"my_escaper\"
Does this work?\tYes it does
And can we span
multiple lines?\t\"Yes\twe\tcan!\"

Improvements:

• turned code into a function
• added multiline support
• fixed a bug in escaping
• easy to create a function for a specific multiple replacement

Enjoy! :-)

Answer 5

Another example : Input list

error_list = ['[br]', '[ex]', 'Something']
words = ['how', 'much[ex]', 'is[br]', 'the', 'fish[br]', 'noSomething', 'really']

The desired output would be

words = ['how', 'much', 'is', 'the', 'fish', 'no', 'really']

Code :

[n[0][0] if len(n[0]) else n[1] for n in [[[w.replace(e,"") for e in error_list if e in w],w] for w in words]] 

Answer 6

Here is another way of doing it with a dictionary:

listA="The cat jumped over the house".split()
modify = {word:word for number,word in enumerate(listA)}
modify["cat"],modify["jumped"]="dog","walked"
print " ".join(modify[x] for x in listA)