Trying to use 'replace' function to replace certain words in a string

Question

I am trying to replace all four letter words in a document that I read and replace it with four stars say. The code can identify the four letter words but it is not able to replace them. What am I doing incorrectly?

This is the code I have so far.

# wordfreq.py
import string

def compareItems((w1, c1),(w2,c2)):
    if c1 >c2:
        return -1
    elif c1 == c2:
        return cmp(w1, w2)
    else :
        return 1


def main() :
    print """This program analyzes word frequency in a file and
            prints a report on the n most frequent words. \n """

    # get the sequence of words from the file
    fname = raw_input("File to analyze: ")
    text = open(fname, 'r').read()
    text = str.lower(text)
    for ch in '!"#$%&()*+,-./:;<=>?@[[\\]^_`{|}`' :
        text = string.replace(text, ch, ' ')
    words = string.split(text) 

    # construct a dictionary of word counts
    counts = {}
    for w in words :
        if len(w) == 4:
            w.replace("w", "\****", )
    print words 


if __name__ == '__main__': main()

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-28 16:13:52Z

1

str.replace() returns the updated text, and you are trying to replace the string "w", not the value in the variable w. You don't really need to use str.replace() here; you have a list and you just need to replace all elements of length 4 with a different string.

Use a list comprehension to replace values in a list:

words = ['****' if len(w) == 4 else w for w in words]
print ' '.join(words)

edited Jan 28, 2014 at 16:13

answered Jan 28, 2014 at 16:05

Martijn Pieters

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