Best way to replace multiple characters in a string?

Question

I need to replace some characters as follows: & ➔ \\&, # ➔ \\#, ...

I coded as follows, but I guess there

Answer 1

Using reduce which is available in python2.7 and python3.* you can easily replace mutiple substrings in a clean and pythonic way.

# Lets define a helper method to make it easy to use
def replacer(text, replacements):
    return reduce(
        lambda text, ptuple: text.replace(ptuple[0], ptuple[1]), 
        replacements, text
    )

if __name__ == '__main__':
    uncleaned_str = "abc&def#ghi"
    cleaned_str = replacer(uncleaned_str, [("&","\&"),("#","\#")])
    print(cleaned_str) # "abc\&def\#ghi"

In python2.7 you don't have to import reduce but in python3.* you have to import it from the functools module.