What is the simplest way to swap each pair of adjoining chars in a string with Python?

Question

I want to swap each pair of characters in a string. \'2143\' becomes \'1234\', \'badcfe\' becomes \'abcdef\'.

How

Answer 1

If performance or elegance is not an issue, and you just want clarity and have the job done then simply use this:

def swap(text, ch1, ch2):
    text = text.replace(ch2, '!',)
    text = text.replace(ch1, ch2)
    text = text.replace('!', ch1)
    return text

This allows you to swap or simply replace chars or substring. For example, to swap 'ab' <-> 'de' in a text:

_str = "abcdefabcdefabcdef"
print swap(_str, 'ab','de') #decabfdecabfdecabf