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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T13:42:23+00:00

I need to find and replace version numbers within text with a generic placeholder

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I need to find and replace version numbers within text with a generic placeholder e.g. ‘*’.

Problem is writing the regex that would capture the version numbers.

Some examples:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.04 Chromium/14.0.825.0 Chrome/14.0.825.0 Safari/535.1

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10gin_lib.cc

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pt-PT; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100713 Firefox/3.6.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Version numbers contain:

  • alphanumeric characters
  • special characters i.e. ‘.-_:’

A simple regex might be r'[0-9._:-]+' but this does not work as version number needs at least 1 alphanumeric chars and special character in between alphanumeric characters.

Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In the re module, use the sub function. It will return a string where all the matches for the input regex are replaced by the output of a function, or just a string. The problem is in determining which version numbers in each string you want to replace. I’m assuming that you want all version numbers replaced.

    import re
data = ["Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/11.04 Chromium/14.0.825.0 Chrome/14.0.825.0 Safari/535.1",
"Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10gin_lib.cc",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; pt-PT; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100713 Firefox/3.6.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"]
output = []
for str in data:
   output.append(re.sub(r'\d[0-9a-zA-Z._:-]+', '*', str))
print output

    gives these results:

    ['Mozilla/* (X*; Linux i*) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/* Chromium/* Chrome/* Safari/*', 
'Mozilla/*(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS * like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/* Mobile/* Safari/*',
'Mozilla/* (Windows; U; Windows NT *; pt-PT; rv:*) Gecko/* Firefox/* (.NET CLR *)']

    The regex isn’t very good, I wanted a repeating set of alphanumerics followed by a delimiter. But I couldn’t seem to get it to work. Something like ([0-9a-zA-Z]+[._:-])+

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