Python3 - .replace() strings while writing to a CSV file

Question

I'm trying to loop through each column of each row of data scraped from a website table to look for and remove specific sub-strings. After each column in a row has been checked and replaced if need be, the row should be appended to the CSV file.

I've tried a few different things but nothing is working. Here is my current code.

with open('Transactions.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
    writer = csv.writer(outfile)
    writer.writerow([account_name, account_number])
    writer.writerow(["Date", "Details", "Debit", "Credit", "Balance"])
    for row in soup.select('tr'):
        text_columns = [td.a.get_text(strip=True) if td.a else td.get_text(strip=True) for td in row.select('td')]
        column_array = []
        for col in text_columns:
          if (col.find("+$") != -1):
            col.replace("+$", "")
            column_array.append(col)
          elif (col.find("minus$") != -1):
            col.replace("minus$", "")
            column_array.append(col)
          else:
            column_array.append(col)
        writer.writerow(column_array)

The file is still produced without any of the sub-strings being removed. Please help.

Answer 1

Got it sorted thanks to Barmar within the comments of the original question.

Here is my current working, and simplified code.

# Writing website data to a CSV file
with open('Transactions.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
    writer = csv.writer(outfile)
    writer.writerow([account_name, account_number])
    writer.writerow(["Date", "Details", "Debit", "Credit", "Balance"])
    for row in soup.select('tr'):
        text_columns = [td.a.get_text(strip=True) if td.a else td.get_text(strip=True) for td in row.select('td')]
        column_array = []
        for col in text_columns:
          str = col.replace("+$", "").replace("minus$", "")
          column_array.append(str)
        writer.writerow(column_array)