Character Translation using Python (like the tr command)

Question

Is there a way to do character translation / transliteration (kind of like the tr command) using Python?

Some examples in Perl would be:

my $string = "some fields"; $string =~ tr/dies/eaid/; print $string;  # domi failed  $string = 'the cat sat on the mat.'; $string =~ tr/a-z/b/d; print "$string\n";  # b b   b.  (because option "d" is used to delete characters not replaced) 

Answer 1

See string.translate

import string "abc".translate(string.maketrans("abc", "def")) # => "def" 

Note the doc's comments about subtleties in the translation of unicode strings.

And for Python 3, you can use directly:

str.translate(str.maketrans("abc", "def")) 

Edit: Since tr is a bit more advanced, also consider using re.sub.

Answer 2

If you're using python3 translate is less verbose:

>>> 'abc'.translate(str.maketrans('ac','xy')) 'xby' 

Ahh.. and there is also equivalent to tr -d:

>>> "abc".translate(str.maketrans('','','b')) 'ac'  

For tr -d with python2.x use an additional argument to translate function:

>>> "abc".translate(None, 'b') 'ac'