Question

Is it possible to do something like this in Python using regular expressions?

Increment every character that is a number in a string by 1

So input “123ab5” would become “234ab6”

I know I could iterate over the string and manually increment each character if it’s a number, but this seems unpythonic.

note. This is not homework. I’ve simplified my problem down to a level that sounds like a homework exercise.

Answer 1

a = "123ab5"

b = ''.join(map(lambda x: str(int(x) + 1) if x.isdigit() else x, a))

or:

b = ''.join(str(int(x) + 1) if x.isdigit() else x for x in a)

or:

import string
b = a.translate(string.maketrans('0123456789', '1234567890'))

In any of these cases:

# b == "234ab6"

EDIT – the first two map 9 to a 10, the last one wraps it to 0. To wrap the first two into zero, you will have to replace str(int(x) + 1) with str((int(x) + 1) % 10)