Inconsistent behaviour for replace

[getzze]

Julia Version 1.0.0

Steps to reproduce:

a = "1,2,3"
replace(a, "1"=>"0", "2"=>"1")
# MethodError: no method matching replace(::String, ::Pair{String,String}, ::Pair{String,String})

When acting on a String, replace argument is: replace(::AbstractString, pat=>r), where (quoting from the docs)

pat may be a single character, a vector or a set of characters, a string, or a regular expression

On the contrary, when acting on a collection (although Strings are collections): replace(collection, new_old::Pair...) with variable number of arguments.

replace for Strings should follow the same semantics as for collection (maybe also implementing the version taking a function as argument). But the fact that pat can be an array of characters is useful for removing several characters for example.

[nalimilan]

Yes, the multiple-pair method is missing. #25732 fixes this.

[diegozea]

#25732 hasn't been merged, so this inconsistency behaviour of replace between Strings and Vectors remains.

Related issue: #29849

[diegozea]

This is a short alternative to replace("1,2,3", "1"=>"0", "2"=>"1"):

julia> reduce(replace, ("1"=>"0", "2"=>"1"), init="1,2,3")
"0,1,3"

[o314]

Hiccup.jl use the macrotools package to do this

htmlescape(s::AbstractString) =
    @> s replace("&" => "&amp;") replace("<" => "&lt;") replace(">" => "&gt;")

but i found it's very overkill there.

[o314]

That's simply works

Base.replace(s::String, oldnews::Pair...) = reduce(replace, oldnews, init=s)

using Test
@test Base.replace("a & b > c", "&"=>"&",">"=>">") == "a & b > c"

[nalimilan]

See #30457.

[laborg]

This has finally been implemented in #40484