Question

I would like to use the .replace function to replace multiple strings.

I currently have

string.replace("condition1", "")

but would like to have something like

string.replace("condition1", "").replace("condition2", "text")

although that does not feel like good syntax

what is the proper way to do this? kind of like how in grep/regex you can do \1 and \2 to replace fields to certain search strings

Answer 1

Here is a short example that should do the trick with regular expressions:

import re

rep = {"condition1": "", "condition2": "text"} # define desired replacements here

# use these three lines to do the replacement
rep = dict((re.escape(k), v) for k, v in rep.iteritems()) 
#Python 3 renamed dict.iteritems to dict.items so use rep.items() for latest versions
pattern = re.compile("|".join(rep.keys()))
text = pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], text)

For example:

>>> pattern.sub(lambda m: rep[re.escape(m.group(0))], "(condition1) and --condition2--")
'() and --text--'