rreplace - How to replace the last occurrence of an expression in a string?
Is there a quick way in Python to replace strings but, instead of starting from the beginning as replace
does, starting from the end? For example:
>>> def rreplace(old, new, occurrence)
>>> ... # Code to replace the last occurrences of old by new
>>> '<div><div>Hello</div></div>'.rreplace('</div>','</bad>',1)
>>> '<div><div>Hello</div></bad>'
>>> def rreplace(s, old, new, occurrence):
... li = s.rsplit(old, occurrence)
... return new.join(li)
...
>>> s
'1232425'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 2)
'123 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 3)
'1 3 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 4)
'1 3 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 0)
'1232425'
Here is a one-liner:
result = new.join(s.rsplit(old, maxreplace))
Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. The first maxreplace occurrences are replaced.
and a full example of this in use:
s = 'mississipi'
old = 'iss'
new = 'XXX'
maxreplace = 1
result = new.join(s.rsplit(old, maxreplace))
>>> result
'missXXXipi'
I'm not going to pretend that this is the most efficient way of doing it, but it's a simple way. It reverses all the strings in question, performs an ordinary replacement using str.replace
on the reversed strings, then reverses the result back the right way round:
>>> def rreplace(s, old, new, count):
... return (s[::-1].replace(old[::-1], new[::-1], count))[::-1]
...
>>> rreplace('<div><div>Hello</div></div>', '</div>', '</bad>', 1)
'<div><div>Hello</div></bad>'