How To Find and Replace Unicode String in Python?

Question

I have a text file containing a list of Unicode strings. Let's say list.txt and I have another dictionary file dict.txt that contains a list of words (Unicode also), which needs to be searched in the first file and replaced with something else. However, my code is executing without error but not doing the find/replace properly.

list.txt

राम गोपाल
राम प्रसाद

etc.

dict.txt

गोपाल
प्रसाद

find_replace.py

import string

# read the dictionary file of terms (each term in one line)
terms = open('dict.txt', encoding='utf-8').read().splitlines()

# read the file that contains terms to be replaced
original = open('list.txt', encoding='utf-8').read()

# initialize
replaced = ""

for term in terms:
    replaced = original.replace(term, u"")

print(replaced)

Any suggestion on how to do this?

Answer 1

you can do this:

# read the dictionary file of terms (each term in one line)
terms = open('dict.txt', encoding='utf-8').read().splitlines()

# read the file that contains terms to be replaced
original = open('list.txt', encoding='utf-8').read()

# initialize
replaced = original

for term in terms:
    replaced = replaced.replace(term, u'something else')

print(replaced)