Elegant solutions to replacing multiple characters in a string

Question

I'm scraping a Html report for people using licenses for a bespoke software, as a way to bulk email them asking to free up a license in times of need.

I split the string read from the html file into a list, separated by newlines, and .split() out everything else I don't need (like html formatting, pc name etc.)

The output from the file however looks like:

["foo.bar", 'test.name', "john.doe"] etc.

I added @[companyname].com to the end of each name, and converted the entire list to a string. Then, I come to my issue. I want to get rid of the unneeded text from the list. as shown below:

onlineUsers = str(userEmailAddress).replace(",",";").replace("[","").replace("]","").replace("'","")

I added the following browser popup with a mailto link at the bottom:

webbrowser.open_new("mailto:" + onlineUsers)

And everything works like a dream, however the chaining of .replace() really bugs me. I've looked around for more elegant solutions, but they end up being more clunky and it seems like using a sledgehammer on a nail.

Is there an elegant way to do multiple replaces simultaneously? Or, at least, is there a better way to format this?

Answer 1

To avoid chaining explicitly, you can create a dict() of text to be replaced as keys and text to be replaced with as values t, something like this :

lst = ["blah[,].com", "gen@,]'com"]
rpl = {
    "," : ";",
    "[" : "",
    "]" : "",
    "'" : ""
}
lst1 = []
for lst_v in lst : 
    for k, v in rpl.items():
        lst_v = lst_v.replace(k, v)
    lst1.append(lst_v)
print lst1

This will result in :

['blah;.com', 'gen@;com']

Answer 2

Please, also read my comment on the original question.

As to still provide an answer, something I've used before is this:

for char in ['b\'', "\'", "\\n", '"', '[', ']', ',']: # Add any kind of char you would like to remove
    if char in targeted_variable_value:
        clean_output = targeted_variable_value.replace(char, "")