Replacing large number of substrings

[Will McGugan]

Hi,

Is there a simple way of replacing a large number of substrings in a
string? I was hoping that str.replace could take a dictionary and use it
to replace the occurrences of the keys with the dict values, but that
doesnt seem to be the case.

To clarify, something along these lines..
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>> dict_replace( "a b c", dict(a="x", b="y") )[/color][/color][/color]
"x y c"


Regards,

Will McGugan
--

http://www.kelpiesoft.com

[tiissa]

Re: Replacing large number of substrings

Will McGugan wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi,
>
> Is there a simple way of replacing a large number of substrings in a
> string? I was hoping that str.replace could take a dictionary and use it
> to replace the occurrences of the keys with the dict values, but that
> doesnt seem to be the case.[/color]

You can look at the re.sub [1] and try:

d={'a':'x', 'b':'y'}

def repl(match):
return d.get(match.gro up(0), '')

print re.sub("(a|b)", repl, "a b c")


[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
> >>> dict_replace( "a b c", dict(a="x", b="y") )[/color][/color]
> "x y c"[/color]

Above, I gave the pattern myself but you can try to have it generated
from the keys:


def dict_replace(s, d):
pattern = '(%s)'%'|'.join (d.keys())
def repl(match):
return d.get(match.gro up(0), '')
return re.sub(pattern, repl, s)


On your example, I get:
[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>> dict_replace('a b c', {'a': 'x', 'b': 'y'})[/color][/color][/color]
'x y c'[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
>>>[/color][/color][/color]



[1] http://python.org/doc/2.4.1/lib/node114.html

[Robert Kern]

Re: Replacing large number of substrings

Will McGugan wrote:[color=blue]
> Hi,
>
> Is there a simple way of replacing a large number of substrings in a
> string? I was hoping that str.replace could take a dictionary and use it
> to replace the occurrences of the keys with the dict values, but that
> doesnt seem to be the case.
>
> To clarify, something along these lines..
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >>> dict_replace( "a b c", dict(a="x", b="y") )[/color][/color]
> "x y c"[/color]

(n.b. untested!)

def dict_replace(st ring, replacements):
for key, value in replacements.it eritems():
string = string.replace( key, value)
return string

How well this works depends on how large is "large." If "large" is
really very large, then you might want to build something using a more
suitable algorithm like the Aho-Corasick algorithm.

http://www.lehuen.com/nicolas/download/pytst/

http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/ahocorasick/

--
Robert Kern
rkern@ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
-- Richard Harter

[Michael J. Fromberger]

Re: Replacing large number of substrings

In article <431af96c$0$294 38$da0feed9@new s.zen.co.uk>,
Will McGugan <news@NOwillmcg uganSPAM.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hi,
>
> Is there a simple way of replacing a large number of substrings in a
> string? I was hoping that str.replace could take a dictionary and use it
> to replace the occurrences of the keys with the dict values, but that
> doesnt seem to be the case.
>
> To clarify, something along these lines..
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> >>> dict_replace( "a b c", dict(a="x", b="y") )[/color][/color]
> "x y c"[/color]

Hi, Will,

Perhaps the following solution might appeal to you:

.. import re
..
.. def replace_many(s, r):
.. """Replace substrings of s. The parameter r is a dictionary in
.. which each key is a substring of s to be replaced and the
.. corresponding value is the string to replace it with.
.. """
.. exp = re.compile('|'. join(re.escape( x) for x in r.keys()))
.. return exp.sub(lambda m: r.get(m.group() ), s)

Cheers,
-M

--
Michael J. Fromberger | Lecturer, Dept. of Computer Science
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sting/ | Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA