Question

I need to return the given puzzle with each alphabetic character replaced by the HIDDEN character.

HIDDEN = '^' 

def blah(r):
    r = HIDDEN * len(r)
    return r

This function works for replacing any string I need, but the question specifically asks that each ALPHABETIC character be replaced.

So I can’t have 4 or ' or ? being replaced with HIDDEN because they’re not alphabetic characters.

How should I go about this?

Answer 1

One approach: use the translate method:

import string

table = string.maketrans(string.ascii_letters, '^'*len(string.ascii_letters))

def blah(r):
    return r.translate(table)

Another approach: use re.sub:

import re

def blah(r):
    return re.sub(r'[a-zA-Z]', r'^', r)