replace strings inside a substring

Question

Hi.

I have this string: "The quick brown f0x jumps 0ver the lazy d0g, the quick brown f0x jumps 0ver the lazy d0g.".

I need a function that will replace all zeros between "brown" and "lazy" with "o". So the output will look like this: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d0g, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d0g.". So it will look all over the string and most importantly will leave all other zeros intact.

function(text, leftBorder, rightBorder, searchString, replaceString) : string;

Is there any good algorithm?

Answer 1

If you have Python, here's an example using just string manipulation, eg split(), indexing etc. Your programming language should have these features as well.

>>> s="The quick brown f0x jumps 0ver the lazy d0g, the quick brown f0x jumps 0ver the lazy d0g."
>>> words = s.split("lazy")
>>> for n,word in enumerate(words):
...     if "brown" in word:
...         w = word.split("brown")
...         w[-1]=w[-1].replace("0","o")
...         word = 'brown'.join(w)
...     words[n]=word
...
>>> 'lazy'.join(words)
'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d0g, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy d0g.'
>>>

The steps:

1. Split the words on "lazy" to an array A
2. Go through each element in A to look for "brown"
3. if found , split on "brown" into array B. The part you are going to change is the last element
4. replace it with whatever methods your programming language provides
5. join back the array B using "brown"
6. update this element in the first array A
7. lastly, join the whole string back using "lazy"