[Python-ideas] string.replace should accept a list as a first argument

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 06.10.2015 21:25, Emil Rosendahl Petersen wrote:
> I think string.replace should be changed accept a list as a first
> argument.
> 
> That way, if I had this string:
> 
> "There are a lot of undesirable people in this filthy world"
> 
> Then I could do this, replace(['undesirable', 'filthy'], ''), in case
> that's what I wanted to do.
> 
> Now, string.replace doesn't accept a list as its first argument, and
> complains about implicit conversion.
> 
> Is there any great obstacle to just having the function loop over that
> list, calling itself in case we get a list argument instead of a str?
> 
> Doesn't that seem like the more obvious behaviour? To me the results of
> running the above code should be unsurprising, if this change was
> implemented: "there are a lot of people in this world".

I think the "one obvious way" of doing a multi-replace is to
use the re module, since implementing this efficiently is
non-trivial.

String methods are meant to be basic (high performance)
operations.

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Marc-Andre Lemburg
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