How to replace characters in a string?

[Roel Schroeven]

Op 8/06/2022 om 11:25 schreef Dave:
> Hi,
>
> I misunderstood how it worked, basically I’ve added this function:
>
> def filterCommonCharacters(theString):
>
>      myNewString = theString.replace("\u2019", "'")
>
>      return myNewString
> Which returns a new string replacing the common characters.
>
> This can easily be extended to include other characters as and when they come up by adding a line as so:
>
>      myNewString = theString.replace("\u2014", “]”  #just an example
>
> Which is what I was trying to achieve.
When you have multiple replacements to do, there's an alternative for 
multiple replace calls: you can use theString.translate() with a 
translation map (which you can make yourself or make with 
str.maketrans()) to do all the replacements at once. Example

     # Make a map that translates every character from the first string 
to the
     # corresponding character in the second string
     translation_map = str.maketrans("\u2019\u2014", "']")

     # All the replacements in one go
     myNewString = theString.translate(translation_map)

See:
     - https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/stdtypes.html#str.maketrans
     - https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/stdtypes.html#str.translate

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