Replacing specific occurrences of strings in Python

Question

Suppose I have

examplestring='hello abcde hello xyz hello goodbye'.

I want to substitute the second occurrence of 'hello' with 'bye' without substituting all occurrences of 'hello'.

How do I do this?

galath · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-24 05:22:01Z

2

You could split and then join:

In [1]: s = 'hello abcde hello xyz hello goodbye'

In [2]: words = s.split('hello')

In [3]: 'hello'.join(words[:2]) + 'bye' + 'hello'.join(words[2:])
Out[3]: 'hello abcde bye xyz hello goodbye'

answered Jul 24, 2015 at 5:22

galath

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Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-24 05:06:00Z

2

You may try this,

re.sub(r'^(.*?hello.*?)hello', r'\1bye', s)

or

re.sub(r'^(.*?\bhello\b.*?)\bhello\b', r'\1bye', s)

answered Jul 24, 2015 at 5:06

Avinash Raj

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