'in-place' string modifications in Python

Question

In Python, strings are immutable.

What is the standard idiom to walk through a string character-by-character and modify it?

The only methods I can think of a

Answer 1

Here is an example using translate to switch "-" with "." and uppercase "a"s

>>> from string import maketrans
>>> trans_table = maketrans(".-a","-.A")
>>> "foo-bar.".translate(trans_table)
'foo.bAr-'

This is much more efficient that flipping to byte array and back if you just need to do single char replacements