How to replace multiple substrings of a string?

I built this upon F.J.s excellent answer:

import re

def multiple_replacer(*key_values):
    replace_dict = dict(key_values)
    replacement_function = lambda match: replace_dict[match.group(0)]
    pattern = re.compile("|".join([re.escape(k) for k, v in key_values]), re.M)
    return lambda string: pattern.sub(replacement_function, string)

def multiple_replace(string, *key_values):
    return multiple_replacer(*key_values)(string)

One shot usage:

>>> replacements = (u"café", u"tea"), (u"tea", u"café"), (u"like", u"love")
>>> print multiple_replace(u"Do you like café? No, I prefer tea.", *replacements)
Do you love tea? No, I prefer café.

Note that since replacement is done in just one pass, "café" changes to "tea", but it does not change back to "café".

If you need to do the same replacement many times, you can create a replacement function easily:

>>> my_escaper = multiple_replacer(('"','\\"'), ('\t', '\\t'))
>>> many_many_strings = (u'This text will be escaped by "my_escaper"',
                       u'Does this work?\tYes it does',
                       u'And can we span\nmultiple lines?\t"Yes\twe\tcan!"')
>>> for line in many_many_strings:
...     print my_escaper(line)
... 
This text will be escaped by \"my_escaper\"
Does this work?\tYes it does
And can we span
multiple lines?\t\"Yes\twe\tcan!\"

Improvements:

• turned code into a function
• added multiline support
• fixed a bug in escaping
• easy to create a function for a specific multiple replacement

Enjoy! :-)

Or just for a fast hack:

for line in to_read:
    read_buffer = line              
    stripped_buffer1 = read_buffer.replace("term1", " ")
    stripped_buffer2 = stripped_buffer1.replace("term2", " ")
    write_to_file = to_write.write(stripped_buffer2)