string maniupulations, oops, how do I replace parts of a string

Posted by Joe Gibson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Joe Gibson
Published on 2012-10-30T16:56:37Z Indexed on 2012/10/30 17:00 UTC
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I am very new to python. Could someone explain how I can manipulate a string like this?

This function receives three inputs:

  1. complete_fmla: has a string with digits and symbols but has no hyphens ('-') nor spaces.

  2. partial_fmla: has a combination of hyphens and possibly some digits or symbols, where the digits and symbols that are in it (other than hyphens) are in the same position as in the complete_formula.

  3. symbol: one character

The output that should be returned is:

  1. If the symbol is not in the complete formula, or if the symbol is already in the partial formula, the function should return the same formula as the input partial_formula.

  2. If the symbol is in the complete_formula and not in the partial formula, the function should return the partial_formula with the symbol substituting the hyphens in the positions where the symbol is, in all the occurrences of symbol in the complete_formula.

For example:

generate_next_fmla (‘abcdeeaa’, ‘- - - - - - - - ’, ‘d’) should return ‘- - - d - - - -’

generate_next_fmla (‘abcdeeaa’, ‘- - - d - - - - ’, ‘e’) should return ‘- - - d e e - -’

generate_next_fmla (‘abcdeeaa’, ‘- - - d e e - - ’, ‘a’) should return ‘a - - d e e a a’

Basically, I'm working with the definition: def generate_next_fmla (complete_fmla, partial_fmla, symbol):

Do I turn them into lists? and then append? Also, should I find out the index number for the symbol in the complete_fmla so that I know where to append it in the string with hyphens??

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