Question

I have code like this:

def escape_query(query):
    special_chars = ['\\','+','-','&&','||','!','(',')','{','}','[',']',
                     '^','"','~','*','?',':']
    for character in special_chars:
        query = query.replace(character, '\\%s' % character)
    return query

This function should escape all occurrences of every substring (Notice && and ||) in special_characters with backslash.

I think, that my approach is pretty ugly and I couldn’t stop wondering if there aren’t any better ways to do this. Answers should be limited to standart library.

Answer 1

Using reduce:

def escape_query(query):
  special_chars =  ['\\','+','-','&&','||','!','(',')','{','}','[',']',
                     '^','"','~','*','?',':']
  return reduce(lambda q, c: q.replace(c, '\\%s' % c), special_chars, query)