Question

I am trying to replace the Nth appearance of a needle in a haystack. I want to do this simply via re.sub(), but cannot seem to come up with an appropriate regex to solve this. I am trying to adapt: http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/cookbook/ch06_06.htm but am failing at spanning multilines, I suppose.

My current method is an iterative approach that finds the position of each occurrence from the beginning after each mutation. This is pretty inefficient and I would like to get some input. Thanks!

Answer 1

I’ve been struggling for a while with this, but I found a solution that I think is pretty pythonic:

>>> def nth_matcher(n, replacement):
...     def alternate(n):
...         i=0
...         while True:
...             i += 1
...             yield i%n == 0
...     gen = alternate(n)
...     def match(m):
...         replace = gen.next()
...         if replace:
...             return replacement
...         else:
...             return m.group(0)
...     return match
...     
... 
>>> re.sub("([0-9])", nth_matcher(3, "X"), "1234567890")
'12X45X78X0'

EDIT: the matcher consists of two parts:

1. the alternate(n) function. This returns a generator that returns an infinite sequence True/False, where every nth value is True. Think of it like list(alternate(3)) == [False, False, True, False, False, True, False, ...].

2. The match(m) function. This is the function that gets passed to re.sub: it gets the next value in alternate(n) (gen.next()) and if it’s True it replaces the matched value; otherwise, it keeps it unchanged (replaces it with itself).

I hope this is clear enough. If my explanation is hazy, please say so and I’ll improve it.