CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Archer2486
Archer2486

Reputation: 409

Python: quick way to replace all occurances of a specific word in a list?

I have a list of words. It's pretty large (len(list) ~ 70,000). I'm currently using this code:

replacement = "bla"
for word in data:
    if (word in unique_words):
        word = replacement

This code take a while to perform the operation. Is there a quicker way to do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1059

Answers (2)

jamylak
jamylak

Reputation: 133574

Use a set for unique_words. Sets are considerably faster than lists for determining if an item is in them (see Python Sets vs Lists ).

Also, it's only a stylistic issue but I think you should drop the brackets in the if. It looks cleaner.

Upvotes: 6

Burhan Khalid
Burhan Khalid

Reputation: 174622

The code you have posted doesn't actually do any replacement. Here is a snippet that does:

for key,word in enumerate(data):
   if word in unique_words:
       data[key] = replacement

Here's a more compact way:

new_list = [replacement if word in unique_words else word for word in big_list]

I think unique_words is an odd name for the variable considering its use, perhaps it should be search_list?

Edit:

After your comment, perhaps this is better:

from collections import Counter
c = Counter(data)
only_once = [k for k,v in c.iteritems() if v == 1]

# Now replace all occurances of these words with something else

for k, v in enumerate(data):
    if v in only_once:
        data[k] = replacement

Upvotes: 4

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