Replace Last Substring Occurrence in Python String

Problem Formulation

Given a string, a substring, and a replacement string in Python.

• String s
• Substring sub
• Replacement string repl

How to find and replace the last occurrence of sub with the replacement repl in the Python string s?

Let’s have a look at a couple of examples to thoroughly understand the problem:

Example 1:
s = 'fifi'
sub = 'fi'
repl = 'nxter'
result: 'finxter'

Example 2:
s = '...'
sub = '.'
repl = 'hello'
result: '..hello'

Example 3:
s = 'hello\nworld\nuniverse'
sub = '\n'
repl = ' and '
result: 'hello\nworld and universe'

Let’s dive into the first pure Python method next!

Method 1: rfind()

The Python string.rfind(substr) method returns the highest index in the string where a substring is found, i.e., the index of the last occurrence of the substring in a given string or -1 if not found. You can use slicing in combination with the found index to solve the problem like so:

index = s.rfind(sub)
s[:index] + repl + s[index+len(sub):]

• You use s.rfind(sub) to find the last occurrence of sub in s.
• You use slicing operations s[:index] and s[index+len(sub):] to obtain the unchanged parts of the new string that are not replaced.
• You insert the replacement string repl using string concatenation with the results of the above slicing operations.

Let’s have a look at a practical example next!

Example: Here’s how you can create a new string with the last occurrence of a given substring replaced by a given replacement string:

def repl_last(s, sub, repl):
    index = s.rfind(sub)
    if index == -1:
        return s
    return s[:index] + repl + s[index+len(sub):]


# Example 1:
s = 'fifi'
sub = 'fi'
repl = 'nxter'
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: 'finxter'

For comprehensibility, let’s dive into the other two examples introduced in the problem formulation:

# Example 2:
s = '...'
sub = '.'
repl = 'hello'
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: '..hello'


# Example 3:
s = 'hello\nworld\nuniverse'
sub = '\n'
repl = ' and '
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: 'hello\nworld and universe'

You can find some background information on rfind() and multiple other string methods in the following video—conquer string methods once and for all! 🙂

Method 2: Regex sub()

The regex function re.sub(P, R, S) replaces all occurrences of the pattern P with the replacement R in string S. It returns a new string.

For example, if you call re.sub('a', 'b', 'aabb'), the result will be the new string 'bbbb' with all characters 'a' replaced by 'b'.

However, you don’t want to replace all matching substrings—only the last one. So, how to accomplish that?

Let’s have a look at the short answer—I’ll explain it in more detail and with an example afterwards:

pattern = sub + '(?!.*' + sub + ')'
return re.sub(pattern, repl, s, flags=re.DOTALL)

• You create the pattern sub with the negative lookahead (?!.*sub) to make sure that we match the right-most pattern sub and it does not occur anywhere on the right.
• You replace this rightmost pattern with the replacement string using the re.sub() method.
• You set the re.DOTALL flag to make sure that the dot and asterisk .* part of the pattern matches all characters including the newline character. This is only a minor optimization to correctly match a couple of border cases.

Okay, let’s have a look at the code to see if it correctly solves our problem!

import re


def repl_last(s, sub, repl):
    pattern = sub + '(?!.*' + sub + ')'
    return re.sub(pattern, repl, s, flags=re.DOTALL)


# Example 1:
s = 'fifi'
sub = 'fi'
repl = 'nxter'
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: 'finxter'


# Example 2:
s = '...'
sub = '.'
repl = 'hello'
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: '..hello'


# Example 3:
s = 'hello\nworld\nuniverse'
sub = '\n'
repl = ' and '
result = repl_last(s, sub, repl)
print(result)
# result: 'hello\nworld and universe'

It does! Regex to the rescue!

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Related Tutorial:

• Python Regex Sub

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