'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

I did that like this:

import tempfile
import shutil

...

f_old = open(input_file, 'r')
with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as tmp:
    for line in f_old:
        tmp.write(line.replace(old_string, new_string))
    f_old.close()
    tmp.flush()
    os.fsync(tmp)
    shutil.copy2(tmp.name, input_file)
    tmp.close()