How to replace only part of a word from a string in Python

Question

I have a list of street names

streetNames = ['WELSESTRAAT', 'HENDRIKLAAN', 'LOMMERWEG']

And another list with street abbreviations

streetAbbr = [['WEG', 'WG'], ['STRAAT', 'STR'],['LAAN', 'LN']]

I am trying to loop through street names and replace straat with str, weg with wg and so on but I am stuck in the replace part as there is no such method for only part of a word.

for name in streetNames:
    for abbr in streetAbbr:
        if str(abbr[0]) in str(name):
            name.replace('straat', abbr[1]) #doesn't work

Please edit your question. Improving question format will help other user read you and helping you. — Dorian Turba
– Dorian Turba, Commented Feb 20, 2020 at 10:20
In the last line shoud it not be name.replace(abbr[0], abbr[1])? And you don't need the str() call. — sureshvv
– sureshvv, Commented Feb 20, 2020 at 10:26
If you change name.replace('straat', abbr[1]) by name.replace(abbr[0], abbr[1]), it works fine here. — Jona
– Jona, Commented Feb 20, 2020 at 12:14

yatu · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-20 10:46:55Z

2

The issue in your code is that your are replacing on the variable over which you are iterating, which has no effect on the original list. Instead reassign to the list by indexing it:

d = dict(streetAbbr)
# {'WEG': 'WG', 'STRAAT': 'STR', 'LAAN': 'LN'}

for k,v in d.items():
    for i, name in enumerate(streetNames):
        if k in name:
            streetNames[i] = name.replace(k, v)

print(streetNames)
# ['WELSESTR', 'HENDRIKLN', 'LOMMERWG']

edited Feb 20, 2020 at 10:46

answered Feb 20, 2020 at 10:22

yatu

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Sergio Ferrer Sánchez · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-20 10:23:32Z

1

result = [name.replace(abbr[0], abbr[1]) for name in streetNames for abbr in streetAbbr if abbr[0] in name]

answered Feb 20, 2020 at 10:23

Sergio Ferrer Sánchez

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rohanmehto2 · Accepted Answer · 2020-02-20 13:02:05Z

1

The issue here is that replace() function finds a blank space in order to replace strings. Since there is only a single word in your array, it's not working.

@Yatu's answer is correct but in case you don't want to update the data structures in your code, you can use this use-case specific solution.

for name in streetNames:
    for abbr in streetAbbr:
        if abbr[0] in name:
            new_str = name.split(abbr[0])
            name = f"{new_str[0]}{abbr[1]}" 
            print(name)

This solution may not work if there are multiple occurrences of the same substring in the names because of the usage of split. But since there are no such examples provided in the question it was assumed that this should work.

edited Feb 20, 2020 at 13:02

rohanmehto2

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answered Feb 20, 2020 at 11:31

Samarthya Choudhary

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