Question

I’m looking for a pythonic and efficient replacement for the following self-explanatory code:

term = "< << >" # turn this into "( < )"
term.replace("<<", "#~").replace(">>", "~#").replace(">", ")").replace("<", "(").replace("#~", "<").replace("~#", ">")

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Here’s a shorter method than my first answer. It splits the input on the doubled-up character sequence to remove them, then joins those segments back up again with the replacement single character. As before it uses a dictionary to specify the replacements that should be made.

def convert(s, replacements):
    for before, after in replacements.items():
        s = before.join([segment.replace(before, after) for segment in s.split(before + before)])
    return s

>>> convert('< << >', {'<': '(', '>': ')'})
'( < )'