Is str.replace(..).replace(..) ad nauseam a standard idiom in Python?

Question

For instance, say I wanted a function to escape a string for use in HTML (as in Django\'s escape filter):

    def escape(string):
        \"\"\"
        Retu         


        

Answer 1

In accordance with bebraw's suggestion, here is what I ended up using (in a separate module, of course):

import re

class Subs(object):
    """
    A container holding strings to be searched for and replaced in
    replace_multi().

    Holds little relation to the sandwich.
    """
    def __init__(self, needles_and_replacements):
        """
        Returns a new instance of the Subs class, given a dictionary holding 
        the keys to be searched for and the values to be used as replacements.
        """
        self.lookup = needles_and_replacements
        self.regex = re.compile('|'.join(map(re.escape,
                                             needles_and_replacements)))

def replace_multi(string, subs):
    """
    Replaces given items in string efficiently in a single-pass.

    "string" should be the string to be searched.
    "subs" can be either:
        A.) a dictionary containing as its keys the items to be
            searched for and as its values the items to be replaced.
        or B.) a pre-compiled instance of the Subs class from this module
               (which may have slightly better performance if this is
                called often).
    """
    if not isinstance(subs, Subs): # Assume dictionary if not our class.
        subs = Subs(subs)
    lookup = subs.lookup
    return subs.regex.sub(lambda match: lookup[match.group(0)], string)

Example usage:

def escape(string):
    """
    Returns the given string with ampersands, quotes and angle 
    brackets encoded.
    """
    # Note that ampersands must be escaped first; the rest can be escaped in 
    # any order.
    escape.subs = Subs({'<': '<', '>': '>', "'": ''', '"': '"'})
    return replace_multi(string.replace('&', '&'), escape.subs)

Much better :). Thanks for the help.

Edit

Nevermind, Mike Graham was right. I benchmarked it and the replacement ends up actually being much slower.

Code:

from urllib2 import urlopen
import timeit

def escape1(string):
    """
    Returns the given string with ampersands, quotes and angle
    brackets encoded.
    """
    return string.replace('&', '&').replace('<', '<').replace('>', '>').replace("'", ''').replace('"', '"')

def escape2(string):
    """
    Returns the given string with ampersands, quotes and angle
    brackets encoded.
    """
    # Note that ampersands must be escaped first; the rest can be escaped in
    # any order.
    escape2.subs = Subs({'<': '<', '>': '>', "'": ''', '"': '"'})
    return replace_multi(string.replace('&', '&'), escape2.subs)

# An example test on the stackoverflow homepage.
request = urlopen('http://stackoverflow.com')
test_string = request.read()
request.close()

test1 = timeit.Timer('escape1(test_string)',
                     setup='from __main__ import escape1, test_string')
test2 = timeit.Timer('escape2(test_string)',
                     setup='from __main__ import escape2, test_string')
print 'multi-pass:', test1.timeit(2000)
print 'single-pass:', test2.timeit(2000)

Output:

multi-pass: 15.9897229671
single-pass: 66.5422530174

So much for that.