Why doesn't calling a Python string method do anything unless you assign its output?

Question

I try to do a simple string replacement, but I don't know why it doesn't seem to work:

X = "hello world"
X.replace("hello", "goodbye")

I want to change the word hello to goodbye, thus it should change the string "hello world" to "goodbye world". But X just remains "hello world". Why is my code not working?

Answer 1

This is because strings are immutable in Python.

Which means that X.replace("hello","goodbye") returns a copy of X with replacements made. Because of that you need replace this line:

X.replace("hello", "goodbye")

with this line:

X = X.replace("hello", "goodbye")

More broadly, this is true for all Python string methods that change a string's content "in-place", e.g. replace,strip,translate,lower/upper,join,...

You must assign their output to something if you want to use it and not throw it away, e.g.

X  = X.strip(' \t')
X2 = X.translate(...)
Y  = X.lower()
Z  = X.upper()
A  = X.join(':')
B  = X.capitalize()
C  = X.casefold()

and so on.

Answer 2

All string functions as lower, upper, strip are returning a string without modifying the original. If you try to modify a string, as you might think well it is an iterable, it will fail.

x = 'hello'
x[0] = 'i' #'str' object does not support item assignment

There is a good reading about the importance of strings being immutable: Why are Python strings immutable? Best practices for using them

Answer 3

Example for String Methods

Given a list of filenames, we want to rename all the files with extension hpp to the extension h. To do this, we would like to generate a new list called newfilenames, consisting of the new filenames. Fill in the blanks in the code using any of the methods you’ve learned thus far, like a for loop or a list comprehension.

filenames = ["program.c", "stdio.hpp", "sample.hpp", "a.out", "math.hpp", "hpp.out"]
# Generate newfilenames as a list containing the new filenames
# using as many lines of code as your chosen method requires.
newfilenames = []
for i in filenames:
    if i.endswith(".hpp"):
        x = i.replace("hpp", "h")
        newfilenames.append(x)
    else:
        newfilenames.append(i)


print(newfilenames)
# Should be ["program.c", "stdio.h", "sample.h", "a.out", "math.h", "hpp.out"]