Replacing instances of a character in a string

Question

This simple code that simply tries to replace semicolons (at i-specified postions) by colons does not work:

for i in range(0,len(line)):
     if (line[i]==\"         


        

Answer 1

I wrote this method to replace characters or replace strings at a specific instance. instances start at 0 (this can easily be changed to 1 if you change the optional inst argument to 1, and test_instance variable to 1.

def replace_instance(some_word, str_to_replace, new_str='', inst=0):
    return_word = ''
    char_index, test_instance = 0, 0
    while char_index < len(some_word):
        test_str = some_word[char_index: char_index + len(str_to_replace)]
        if test_str == str_to_replace:
            if test_instance == inst:
                return_word = some_word[:char_index] + new_str + some_word[char_index + len(str_to_replace):]
                break
            else:
                test_instance += 1
        char_index += 1
    return return_word