Question

I have a field in a table that contains string values of degrees minutes seconds in the following format:

179-53-32

I want to replace all the dashes and format this to a proper format of:

179° 53′ 32″

Basically replacing the dashes with the correct character (degree, minute, second) and having spaces in there. I was thinking about doing a repalce by index, but I don’t think it works:

s.replace('-', '° ')[0]
s.replace('-', '\' ')[1]

Is there a way to accomplish what I want to do? maybe enumerate the string first and then replace?

Thanks,
Mike

Answer 1

This would probably do it:

"%s° %s' %s\"" % s.split('-')

You may need to wrap the call to s.split in a tuple call. Otherwise I was getting an error. So it becomes this:

"%s° %s' %s\"" % tuple(s.split('-'))