CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringpython-2.7python-3.xmethods
42piratas
42piratas

Reputation: 595

Is there a way to use the String replace() Method to replace anything

Something like

sentence.replace(*, "newword")

(which doesn't work, btw)

Let's say

sentence = "hello world" return sentence.replace(*, "newworld")

should return "newword newword"

Upvotes: 1

Views: 105

Answers (3)

jayelm
jayelm

Reputation: 7678

If you care about speed, just crafting the string manually seems to be twice as fast:

In [8]: import re

In [9]: sentence = "hello world this is my sentence"

In [10]: nonspace = re.compile('[^\s]+')

In [11]: %timeit re.sub(nonspace, 'newword', sentence)
100000 loops, best of 3: 6.28 µs per loop

In [12]: %timeit ' '.join('newword' for _ in xrange(len(sentence.split())))
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.52 µs per loop

In [13]: sentence *= 40  # Make the sentence longer

In [14]: %timeit re.sub(nonspace, 'newword', sentence)
10000 loops, best of 3: 70.6 µs per loop

In [15]: %timeit ' '.join('newword' for _ in xrange(len(sentence.split())))
10000 loops, best of 3: 30.2 µs per loop

And join is actually faster when you hand it a list, so ' '.join(['newword' for _ in xrange(len(sentence.split()))]) should result in some performance improvements (it caches the result in my informal %timeit tests, so I didn't include it)

Upvotes: 0

Rion Williams
Rion Williams

Reputation: 76557

Since you aren't going to be replacing a specific word, str.replace() won't really support any kind of pattern-matching.

However, you could use the re.sub() function that will allow you to pass in a Regular Expression that would match everything and replace it :

import re
# Replace each series of non-space characters [^\s]+ with "newword"
sentence = re.sub('[^\s]+','newword',sentence)

Example

You can find a complete interactive example of this here and demonstrated below :

enter image description here

Upvotes: 5

Slick
Slick

Reputation: 359

What you're looking for is a word replace. So instead of string.replace which replaces characters, you want something that will replace all words.

>>> sentence = "hello world this is my sentence"
>>> " ".join(["newword"] * len(sentence.split()))
'newword newword newword newword newword newword'

In the above case we're spiting the sentence into a list of it's words and simple making another list of words "newword" of the same length. Finally we're joining the new words together with the " " character in between them

Upvotes: 0

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