Replace words in list by words in dataframe, Python

Question

i have a list of sentences and i need to replace each word by a word from a data frame column. it is a one to one correspondence. here's my code:

def replace_words(x):
    z = [word for line in x for word in line.split()]
    for i in range(0 ,(len(z)-1)):
    z[i] = str.replace(z[i],dataframe[i])
    return z

which eventually gives an error "cant assign to function call" . this is how the data looks like:

x = ['I love flappy brd' , 'i got a platium medal','i hammred my fone']  .

now computing z, gives me:

z = ['I','love','flappy','brd','i','got','a','platium','medal','i','hammred','my','fone']

dataframe is a series(table like object) which has one column , and each row consists of 1 word it looks like this: enter image description here

so now i need to replace words in z with these words(correct ones)in image i.e dataframe .. how do i do that?

Do you want square brackets in the line z[i] = z[i].replace()? — TomAugspurger
yes i did that.. now the problem is with this error - "replace takes atleast 3 arguments(2 given)" . check it out, i've edited my code.. — Hypothetical Ninja

Philip Uren Philip Uren · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-13T05:51:54

You're using str.replace wrong. You should be invoking it on a string, and specifying a substring to replace and a new string to replace it with. It works like this:

>>> x = "hello world"
>>> x.replace("hello", "goodbye")
'goodbye world'

As for your actual program though, it seems from your description that you actually want something like this:

def replace_words(x, dataframe):
  z = [word for line in x for word in line.split()]
  for i in range(0, len(z)):
    z[i] = dataframe[i]
  return z

dataframe = ["I", "love", "flappy", "bird", "i", "got", "a", "platinum", "medal", "i", "hammered", "my", "phone"]
x = ['I love flappy brd' , 'i got a platium medal','i hammred my fone']
print "x was: " + str(x)
print "now: " + str(replace_words(x, dataframe))

That will output:

x was: ['I love flappy brd', 'i got a platium medal', 'i hammred my fone']
now: ['I', 'love', 'flappy', 'bird', 'i', 'got', 'a', 'platinum', 'medal', 'i', 'hammered', 'my', 'phone']

Though I must admit, that seems pointless, since the result is exactly the same as what is in data frame. Perhaps you can further clarify.

Replace words in list by words in dataframe, Python

1 Answers