Replacing parts of strings in a list in Python

Question

I know similar questions exist for this topic but I've gone through them and still couldn't get it.

My python program retrieves a subsection of html from a page using a regular expression. I just realised that I hadn't accounted for html special characters getting in the way.

say I have:

regex_title = ['I went to the store', 'Itlt'sa nice day today', 'I went home for a rest']

I obviously want to change lt' to a single quote '.

I've tried variations of:

for each in regex_title:
    if 'lt'' in regex_title:
        str.replace("lt'", "'")

but had no success. What am I missing.

NOTE: The purpose is to do this without importing any more modules.

Answer 1

str.replace does not replace in-place. It returns the replaced string. You need to assigned back the return value.

>>> regex_title = ['I went to the store', 'Itlt's a nice day today',
...                'I went home for a rest']
>>> regex_title = [s.replace("lt'", "'") for s in regex_title]
>>> regex_title
['I went to the store', "It's a nice day today", 'I went home for a rest']

Answer 2

If your task is to unescape HTML, then better use unescape function:

>>> ll = ['I went to the store', 'Itlt's a nice day today', 'I went home for a rest']
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> print map(h.unescape, ll)
['I went to the store', u"Itlt's a nice day today", 'I went home for a rest']

Answer 3

You need to change your code to this :

for each in regex_title:
    if 'lt'' in each:
        each.replace("lt'", "'")

But it doesn't change your list so you need to pass the replaced index to list:

>>> for each in regex_title:
...         if 'lt'' in each:
...             regex_title[regex_title.index(each)]=each.replace("lt'", "'")
... 
>>> regex_title
['I went to the store', "It's a nice day today", 'I went home for a rest']
>>> 

Answer 4

You don't explain why you want to avoid importing standard library modules. There are very few good reasons to deny yourself the use of Python's included batteries; unless you have such a reason (and if you do, you should state it), you should use the functionality provided to you.

In this case, it's the unescape() function from the html module: ¹

from html import unescape

titles = [
    'I went to the store',
    'It's a nice day today',
    'I went home for a rest'
]

fixed = [unescape(s) for s in titles]

>>> fixed
['I went to the store', "It's a nice day today", 'I went home for a rest']

Reimplementing html.unescape() yourself is

1. Pointless.
2. Error-prone.
3. Going to mean constantly going back and adding new cases when new HTML entities crop up in your data.

---

¹ Since Python 3.4, anyway. For previous versions, use HTMLParser.HTMLParser.unescape() as per @stalk's answer .

Answer 5

Instead of doing this yourself, you'd be better off using the HTMLParser library, as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/2087433/2314532 . Read that question and answer for all the details, but the summary is:

import HTMLParser
parser = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
print parser.unescape(''')
# Will print a single ' character

So in your case, you'd want to do something like:

import HTMLParser
parser = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
new_titles = [parser.unescape(s) for s in regex_title]

That will unescape any HTML escape, not just the ' escape that you asked about, and process the entire list all at once.

Answer 6

Try like this:-

 regex_title = ['I went to the store', 'Itlt's a nice day today', 'I went home for a rest']
 str=','.join(regex_title)
 str1=str.replace("lt'","'");    
 print str1.split()