String Replace in Python | Python String Replace

Replacing characters and strings in Python is a crucial task when it comes to Data Cleaning or Text Processing. Your data might have formatting issues with garbage characters that need to be removed, the categories might be having spelling issues, etc. Also while text preprocessing for NLP based problems, string replacement is the most basic and important step while preparing the textual data. 

In this tutorial, we will be going over multiple ways to replace different types of strings. If you are interested to get into data science, check out our data science certifications. By the end of this tutorial, you will have the knowledge of the following:

• Python replace() method
• Regex sub() method
• join() and filter()
• Replacing numeric data in strings

Replace() in Python

The string replace function in Python must be used to swap out one or more instances of a character or substring from the original string with the new character or substring. Strings are immutable, as we all know. As a result, the string replace in Python creates a copy of the updated string (the oldValues and newValues are switched).

Python replace()

The replace(old_str, new_str, count) method consists of 3 arguments:

• old_str: The string or a part of the string that needs to be replaced
• new_str: The string with which the old string needs to be replaced
• count: The count of times the particular string needs to be replaced

Return Value 

Return Type: str

By replacing every instance of the old substring with a new one, this function creates a replica of the string. Only the first count occurrences are replaced if the optional argument count is provided.

If the oldValue that we provided as a parameter to replace() is not present in the original string, the original string is presented as the output.

Complexity 

Time Complexity: O(n)

Space Complexity: O(n)

Replacing all errors with the correct word

Imagine that while writing an article for your project, you made a few typing mistakes throughout the piece. Using Python replace character in string, you can fix them all in a matter of seconds. For greater comprehension, let’s code this.

oldString = ‘CSE is an acronym for Computer Scince Engineering’. 

newString = oldString.replace(‘Scince’, ‘Science’);

print(‘old string:’, oldString)

print(‘new string:’, newString)

Output:

old string: CSE is an acronym for Computer Scince Engineering. 

new string: CSE is an acronym for Computer Science Engineering.

Replacing Full Forms to Abbreviations 

Using the replace function, we can replace every full form that appears in the text with its corresponding abbreviation. For greater comprehension, let’s code this.

oldString = ‘Computer Science Engineering’

newString = oldString.replace(‘Computer Science Engineering’, ‘CSE’)

print(‘old string:’, oldString)

print(‘new string:’, newString)

Output:

old string: Computer Science Engineering. 

new string: CSE 

Let’s go over a few examples to understand the working.

Single replace

Mystr = “This is a sample string”
Newstr = Mystr.replace(‘is’, ‘was’)

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#Output:
Thwas was a sample string

If you recall, Strings in Python are immutable. So when we call the replace method, it essentially makes another string object with the modified data. Moreover, we didn’t specify the count parameter in the above example. If not specified, the replace method will replace all the occurrences of the string.

Multiple replace

Mystr = “This is a sample string”
Newstr = Mystr.replace(“s”, “X”)

#Output:
ThiX iX a Xample Xtring

Multiple replace first n occurrences

If you only want first N occurrences, 

Mystr = “This is a sample string”
Newstr = Mystr.replace(“s”, “X”, 3)

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#Output:
ThiX iX a Xample string

Multiple strings replace

In the above examples, we replaced one string a different number of times. Now what if you want to replace different strings in the same big string. We can write an effective function for it and get it done using the same method.

Consider the example as above, but now we want to replace “h”, “is” and “ng” with “X”.

def MultipleStrings(mainStr, strReplaceList, newStr):
  # Iterating over the strings to be replaced
  for elem in strReplaceList:
      # Checking if string is in the main string
      if elem in mainStr :
          # Replace the string
          mainStr = mainStr.replace(elem, newStr)
 
  return  mainStr

Mystr = “This is a sample string”
Newstr = MultipleStrings(Mystr, [‘h’, ‘is’, ‘ng’] , “X”)

#Output:
TXX X a sample striX

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Replacing with regex

Python’s regex is a module specifically for dealing with text data – be it finding substrings, replacing strings or anything. Regex has the sub() function to find and replace/substitute substrings easily. Let’s go over its syntax and a few use cases. 

The regex.sub(pattern, replacement, original_string) function takes 3 arguments:

• pattern: the substring that needs to be matched and replaced.
• replacement: can be a string which needs to be put in place, or a callable function which returns the value that needs to be put in place.
• original_string: the main string in which the substring has to be replaced.

Same as the replace method, regex also creates another string object with the modified string. Let’s go over a few working examples.

Removing whitespace

Whitespaces can be treated as special characters and replaced with other characters. In the below example, we intend to replace whitespaces with “X”.

import re
Mystr = “This is a sample string”
# Replace all whitespaces in Mystr with ‘X’
Newstr = re.sub(r”\s+”, ‘X’, Mystr)

#Output:
ThisXisXaXsampleXstring

As we see, all the whitespaces were replaced. The pattern is given by r”\s+” which means all the whitespace characters. 

Removing all special characters

To remove all the special characters, we will pass a pattern which matches with all the special characters.

import re
import string
Mystr = “Tempo@@&[(000)]%%$@@66isit$$#$%-+Str”
pattern = r'[‘ + string.punctuation + ‘]’
# Replace all special characters in a string with X
Newstr = re.sub(pattern, ‘X’, Mystr)

#Output:
TempoXXXXX000XXXXXXX66isitXXXXXXXStr

Removing substring as case insensitive

In real life data, there might be cases where there might be many versions of the same word with different upper and lower case characters. To remove them all, putting all the words separately as the pattern wouldn’t be effective. The regex sub() function takes the flag re.IGNORECASE to ignore the cases. Let’s see how it works.

import re
Mystr = “This IS a sample Istring”
# Replace substring in a string with a case-insensitive approach
Newstr = re.sub(r’is’,‘**’, Mystr, flags=re.IGNORECASE)

#Output:
Th** ** a sample **tring

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Removing multiple characters using regex

The regex function can easily remove multiple characters from a string. Below is an example.

import re
Mystr = “This is a sample string”
pattern = r'[hsa]’
# Remove characters ‘h’, ‘s’ and ‘a’ from a string
Newstr = re.sub(pattern, ”, Mystr)

#Output:
Ti i mple tring

Replacing using join()

Another way to remove or replace characters is to iterate through the string and check them against some condition.

charList = [‘h’, ‘s’, ‘a’]
Mystr = “This is a sample string”
# Remove all characters in list, from the string
Newstr = ”.join((elem for elem in Mystr if elem not in charList))

#Output:
Ti i mple tring

Replacing using join() and filter()

Above example can also be done by using the filter function.

Mystr = “This is a sample string”
charList = [‘h’, ‘s’, ‘a’]
# Remove all characters in list, from the string
Newstr = “”.join(filter(lambda k: k not in charList , Mystr))

#Output:
Ti i mple trying

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Replacing numbers

Many times the numerical data is also present in the strings that might need to be removed and processed separately as a different feature. Let’s go over a few examples to see how these can be implemented.

Using regex

Consider the below string from which we need to remove the numeric data.

Mystr = “Sample string9211 of year 20xx”
pattern = r'[0-9]’
# Match all digits in the string and replace them by empty string
Newstr = re.sub(pattern, “”, Mystr)

#Output:
Sample string of year xx

In the above code, we use the matching pattern r'[0-9]’ to match for all the digits. 

Using join() function

We can also iterate upon the string and filter out the digits using the isdigit() method which returns False for alphabets. 

Mystr = “Sample string9211 of year 20xx”
# Iterates over the chars in the string and joins all characters except digits
Newstr = “”.join((item for item in Mystr if not item.isdigit()))

#Output:
Sample string of year xx

Using join() and filter()

Similarly, we can also put the filtering condition in the filter function to only return the characters which return True.

Mystr = “Sample string9211 of year 20xx”

# Filter all the digits from characters in string & join remaining chars
Newstr = “”.join(filter(lambda item: not item.isdigit(), Mystr))

#Output:
Sample string of year xx

Updating the Old Data with New Data

For instance, Facebook rebranded as Meta. The Python replace() method can be used to make changes to the documentation.

str =”Facebook is an online social media service platform. Facebook is an American international technology conglomerate based in California.”

str_replace =str.replace(“Facebook”,”Meta”)

print(“String after replace:”+str_replace)

Output:

Meta is an online social media service platform. Meta is an American international technology conglomerate based in California.

Before you go

We covered a lot of examples showing different ways to remove or replace characters/whitespaces/numbers from a string. We highly recommend you to try out more examples and different ways to do the above examples and also more examples of your own.

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