Replace all the occurrences of specific words

Question

Suppose that I have the following sentence:

bean likes to sell his beans

and I want to replace all occurrences of specific words with other

Answer 1

If you use regex, you can specify word boundaries with \b:

import re

sentence = 'bean likes to sell his beans'

sentence = re.sub(r'\bbean\b', 'robert', sentence)
# 'robert likes to sell his beans'

Here 'beans' is not changed (to 'roberts') because the 's' on the end is not a boundary between words: \b matches the empty string, but only at the beginning or end of a word.

The second replacement for completeness:

sentence = re.sub(r'\bbeans\b', 'cars', sentence)
# 'robert likes to sell his cars'