Pythonic Way of replacing Multiple Characters

Question

I\'ve created a onetime function

a = lambda x: x.replace(\'\\n\', \'\')
b = lambda y: y.replace(\'\\t\', \'\').strip()
c = lambda x: b(a(x))

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Answer 1

Option 1
str.translate
For starters, if you're replacing a lot of characters with the same thing, I'd 100% recommend str.translate.

>>> from string import whitespace as wsp
>>> '\n\ttext   \there\r'.translate(str.maketrans(dict.fromkeys(wsp, '')))
'texthere'

This syntax is valid with python-3.x only. For python-2.x, you will need to import string and use string.maketrans to build the mapping instead.

If you want to exclude whitespace chars itself, then

wsp = set(wsp) - {' '}

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Option 2
re.sub
The regex equivalent of the above would be using re.sub.

>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'\s+', '', '\n\ttext   \there\r')
'texthere'

However, performance wise, str.translate beats this hands down.

Answer 2

The improvements are pretty straightforward:

Drop lambdas. str.replace() method is a function, and in the first line of your snippet you define a function that calls to another function and nothing else. Why do you need the wrapping lambda? The same concerns the second line.

Use return values. Actually, in docs we see:

Return a copy of the string with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new.

So you can do a first replace(), then do a second one on the obtained result.

To sum up, you'll have:

c = x.replace('\n', '').replace('\t', '').strip()

Note: if you have many characters to remove, you'd better use str.translate() but for two of them str.replace() is far more readable.

Cheers!