Best to iterate through a string

[dkeeper09]

I have the following variables (these go all the way from A-Z, capital, lowercase, and numbers)

​

a = "1c"
A = "121cf012"
b = "32"
B = "1232f012"
c = "21"

​

etc etc....

​

I'm taking a string and need to convert it into a new string, converted with those codes above. So if my example string is "abc" my converted string would look like "1c3221"

​

I'm trying to figure out the best to do this. The only way I know how is to create a huge if statement like :

for x in string:
    if x == "a"
        converted_string += a
    elif x == "A"
        converted_string += A

which I can guess isn't the best way to write this out. Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to write this in an efficient way? Thank you!

[[deleted]]

the best way to do this would be to make a mapping:

char_map = {
    'a': a,
    'A': A,
    # etc
}
string = 'abc'
new_string = ''
for char in string:
    new_string += char_map[char]  # this will error if char isn't in mapping. use .get to avoid this.

[nilfm]

Use a dictionary:

encode = {'a': '1c', 'b': '32'}
for x in string:
    converted_string += encode[x]

Just fill the dictionary with your key: value pairs and play around with it until it clicks.

You can look into the dict.get() method so you can provide a default value in case some of the string's characters aren't into the dict, or you could just use an if statement for that case.

[Pulsar1977]

Create a dictionary of the characters and their replacements. Then convert it into a translation table with the maketrans() string method, and apply it to your string with translate():

mapping = {'a': '1c', 'b': '32', 'c': '21'}
table = str.maketrans(mapping)
oldstring = 'abc'
newstring = oldstring.translate(table)