substitution

[Iain King]

On Jan 18, 10:21 am, superpollo <ute... at esempio.net> wrote:
> superpollo ha scritto:
>
> > hi.
>
> > what is the most pythonic way to substitute substrings?
>
> > eg: i want to apply:
>
> > foo --> bar
> > baz --> quux
> > quuux --> foo
>
> > so that:
>
> > fooxxxbazyyyquuux --> barxxxquuxyyyfoo
>
> > bye
>
> i explain better:
>
> say the subs are:
>
> quuux --> foo
> foo --> bar
> baz --> quux
>
> then i cannot apply the subs in sequence (say, .replace() in a loop),
> otherwise:
>
> fooxxxbazyyyquuux --> fooxxxbazyyyfoo --> barxxxbazyyybar -->
> barxxxquuxyyybar
>
> not as intended...


Not sure if it's the most pythonic, but I'd probably do it like this:

def token_replace(string, subs):
	subs = dict(subs)
	tokens = {}
	for i, sub in enumerate(subs):
		tokens[sub] = i
		tokens[i] = sub
	current = [string]
	for sub in subs:
		new = []
		for piece in current:
			if type(piece) == str:
				chunks = piece.split(sub)
				new.append(chunks[0])
				for chunk in chunks[1:]:
					new.append(tokens[sub])
					new.append(chunk)
			else:
				new.append(piece)
		current = new
	output = []
	for piece in current:
		if type(piece) == str:
			output.append(piece)
		else:
			output.append(subs[tokens[piece]])
	return ''.join(output)

>>> token_replace("fooxxxbazyyyquuux", [("quuux", "foo"), ("foo", "bar"), ("baz", "quux")])
'barxxxquuxyyyfoo'

I'm sure someone could whittle that down to a handful of list comps...
Iain