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How to replace all the repeated words except the first one in the string? That is these strings

s='cat WORD dog WORD mouse WORD'
s1='cat1 WORD dog1 WORD'

will be replaced to 

s='cat WORD dog REPLACED mouse REPLACED'
s1='cat1 WORD dog1 REPLACED'

I can't replace the string backward because I don't know how many time the word occurs on each line. I do figure out a circuitous way:

temp=s.replace('WORD','XXX',1)
temp1=temp.replace('WORD','REPLACED')
ss=temp1.replace('XXX','WORD')

But I want a more pythonic method. Do you have any idea?

Ooker
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1 Answers1

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Use a string.count together with the rreplace

>>> def rreplace(s, old, new, occurrence):
...     li = s.rsplit(old, occurrence)
...     return new.join(li)
... 
>>> a
'cat word dog word mouse word'
>>> rreplace(a, 'word', 'xxx', a.count('word') - 1)
'cat word dog xxx mouse xxx'
luoluo
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  • thanks for that. However, `word` is actually a set of words, and I use a dictionary to replace them, e.g. `for i,j in dic.items(): line = rreplace(line,i,j,line.count(i)-1)`. This doesn't work – Ooker Sep 06 '15 at 11:04
  • Please add the complete code, input, output. And what exactly `don't work`? – luoluo Sep 06 '15 at 11:12