Cleaning up a string

[James Stroud]

Hello all,

I dashed off the following function to clean a string in a little 
program I wrote:

def cleanup(astr, changes):
   for f,t in changes:
     atr = astr.replace(f, t)
   return astr

where changes would be a tuple, for example:

changes = (
              ('%', '\%'),
              ('$', '\$'),
              ('-', '_')
           )


If these were were single replacements (like the last), string.translate 
would be the way to go. As it is, however, the above seems fairly 
inefficient as it potentially creates a new string at each round. Does 
some function or library exist for these types of transformations that 
works more like string.translate or is the above the best one can hope 
to do without writing some C? I'm guessing that "if s in astr" type 
optimizations are already done in the replace() method, so that is not 
really what I'm getting after.

James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/