Changing the middle of strings in a list--I know there is a better way.

[J. Cliff Dyer]

On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 10:28 -0700, Ben wrote:
> Hello All:
> 
> I am new to Python, and I love it!! I am running 2.6 on Windows. I
> have a flat text file here is an example of 3 lines with numbers
> changed for security:
> 
> 999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> 999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> 999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> 
> 
> I want to be able to replace specific slices with other values. My
> code below reads a file into a list of strings. Since strings are
> immutable I can't assign different values to a specific slice of the
> string. How can I accomplish this? I read some posts on string
> formatting but I am having trouble seeing how I can use those features
> of the language to solve this problem.
> 
> The code below just puts an 'R' at the beginning of each line like
> this:
> 
> R999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> R999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> R999999999088869199999999990200810999999
> 
> 
> But what I want to do is change the middle of the string. Like this:
> 
> R999999999088869CHANGED99990200810999999
> R999999999088869CHANGED99990200810999999
> R999999999088869CHANGED99990200810999999
> 

Well, it depends on what you want.  Do you want to replace by location
or by matched substring?  One of the following functions might help.

lines = ['999999999088869199999999990200810999999'
         '99999999088869199999999990200810999999'
         '9999999088869199999999990200810999999']

def replace_by_location(string, replacement, start, end):
    return string[:start] + replacement + string[end:]

def replace_by_match(string, substr, replacement):
    return replacement.join(string.split(substr))

location_lines = [replace_by_location(x, 'CHANGED', 15, 22) for x in lines]
match_lines = [replace_by_match(x, '1999999', 'CHANGED') for x in lines]

print location_lines
print match_lines

Cheers,
Cliff

> #My Current Code
> 
> # read the data file in as a list
> F = open('C:\\path\\to\file', "r")
> List = F.readlines()
> F.close()
> 
> #Loop through the file and format each line
> a=len(List)
> while a > 0:
> 
>     List.insert(a,"2")
>     a=a-1
> 
> # write the changed data (list) to a file
> FileOut = open("C:\\path\\to\\file", "w")
> FileOut.writelines(List)
> FileOut.close()
> 
> Thanks for any help and thanks for helping us newbies,
> 
> -Ben
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>