Question

okay here is the example:

data = ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'of', 'the', 'list']
replaceText = 'test'
replaceData =['new', 'test']

i did data.replace(replaceText, replaceData) but it doesn’t work. How to replace a string in a list of string with a list of strings? Any help will be appreciated.

Edit:
The exact condition is to replace or split the words that contain “s” so I put a loop in it. So the end result will print
data = [‘Thi’, ‘i’, ‘a’, ‘te’,’t’, ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘li’,’t’]

Answer 1

In a list, find the position of text with .index(), then replace by using slice assignment:

pos = data.index(replaceText)
data[pos:pos+1] = replaceData

This will replace only one occurrence of replaceText at a time. Demo:

>>> data = ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'of', 'the', 'list']
>>> replaceText = 'test'
>>> replaceData =['new', 'test']
>>> pos = data.index(replaceText)
>>> data[pos:pos+1] = replaceData

To replace all occurences, use pos plus the length of replaceData to skip searching past the previous match:

pos = 0
while True:
    try:
        pos = data.index(replaceText, pos)
    except ValueError:
        break
    data[pos:pos+1] = replaceData
    pos += len(replaceData)

If you need to loop over data while modifying it, use a copy instead:

for n in data[:]:
    # maniplate data