Replace a list of strings with another list of strings using Python

There isn’t any common way to replace a list of strings with another list of strings within a text without applying a for loop or multiple regular expression calls.

With this quick and easy hack, we can do it in one line of code using Pandas DataFrames.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'text': ['Billy is going to visit Rome in November', 'I was born in 10/10/2010', 'I will be there at 20:00']})

print(df)

                                       text
0  Billy is going to visit Rome in November
1                  I was born in 10/10/2010
2                  I will be there at 20:00

to_replace=['Billy','Rome','January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December', '\d{2}:\d{2}', '\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{4}']
replace_with=['name','city','month','time', 'date']

print(df.text.replace(to_replace, replace_with, regex=True))

0    name is going to visit city in month
1                      I was born in date
2                 I will be there at time

Here you can find a great example of this hack where we’re replacing all the punctuation marks. Notice that the replacements on the text are done with the order they appear in the lists .