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

A more general answer... you can do any single pairwise swap with tuples or strings using this approach:

# item can be a string or tuple and swap can be a list or tuple of two
# indices to swap
def swap_items_by_copy(item, swap):
   s0 = min(swap)
   s1 = max(swap)
   if isinstance(item,str):
        return item[:s0]+item[s1]+item[s0+1:s1]+item[s0]+item[s1+1:]
   elif isinstance(item,tuple):
        return item[:s0]+(item[s1],)+item[s0+1:s1]+(item[s0],)+item[s1+1:]
   else:
        raise ValueError("Type not supported")

Then you can invoke it like this:

>>> swap_items_by_copy((1,2,3,4,5,6),(1,2))
(1, 3, 2, 4, 5, 6)
>>> swap_items_by_copy("hello",(1,2))
'hlelo'
>>> 

Thankfully python gives empty strings or tuples for the cases where the indices refer to non existent slices.