Replace a certain substring with dashes in betweenn - python

Question

Is there any string manipulation in python that can achieves the following input and output? If i'm going to use regex how would the regex expression look like to replace the substring?

#inputs
y = sentence-with-dashes
x = this is a sentence with dashes

#output
z = this is a sentence-with-dashes

#####################################
#sometimes the input is pretty messed up like this
y = sentence-with-dashes
x = this is a sentence-with dashes

#output
z = this is a sentence-with-dashes

Duncan · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-17 12:14:47Z

3

I think this should do the trick:

y='sentence-with-dashes'
x='this is a sentence with dashes'
r=re.compile(re.escape(y).replace('\\-','[- ]'))
z=re.sub(r,y,x)

this won't touch any hyphens that appear outside the y value, if you don't care about this then eumiro's answer is simpler, and doesn't require the use of regex.

edited Sep 17, 2012 at 12:14

Duncan

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answered Sep 17, 2012 at 7:25

codebox

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3 Comments

georg Over a year ago

don't forget to add \b where appropriate

Duncan Over a year ago

That won't work if y contains anything with special meaning to regular expressions. Try r=re.compile(re.escape(y).replace('\\-','[- ]')) to protect any non alphanumeric characters.

Duncan Over a year ago

You missed that the hyphen also gets escaped so you have to escape it in the replace call (so I edited it for you).

eumiro · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-17 07:24:37Z

1

If these are the only dashes:

z = x.replace('-', ' ').replace(y.replace('-', ' '), y)

answered Sep 17, 2012 at 7:24

eumiro

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2 Comments

Jon Clements Over a year ago

This works fine for he OP's example, but I can see it gets fun where x = 'ooops - a sentence-with dashes' and the result is z == 'ooops a sentence-with-dashes' (<- there is a double space in there...)...

eumiro Over a year ago

@JonClements - yes, that's why I wrote "if these are the only dashes" . With more dashes it does not work properly.

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