I have a set of strings set1, and all the strings in set1 have a two specific substrings which I don’t need and want to remove.
Sample Input: set1={'Apple.good','Orange.good','Pear.bad','Pear.good','Banana.bad','Potato.bad'}
So basically I want the .good and .bad substrings removed from all the strings.
What I tried:

for x in set1:
    x.replace('.good','')
    x.replace('.bad','')

But this doesn’t seem to work at all. There is absolutely no change in the output and it is the same as the input. I tried using for x in list(set1) instead of the original one but that doesn’t change anything.

Strings are immutable. string.replace (python 2.x) or str.replace (python 3.x) creates a new string. This is stated in the documentation:

Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. …

This means you have to re-allocate the set or re-populate it (re-allocating is easier with set comprehension):

new_set = {x.replace('.good', '').replace('.bad', '') for x in set1}

>>> x = 'Pear.good'
>>> y = x.replace('.good','')
>>> y
'Pear'
>>> x
'Pear.good'

.replace doesn’t change the string, it returns a copy of the string with the replacement. You can’t change the string directly because strings are immutable.

You need to take the return values from x.replace and put them in a new set.

All you need is a bit of black magic!

>>> a = ["cherry.bad","pear.good", "apple.good"]
>>> a = list(map(lambda x: x.replace('.good','').replace('.bad',''),a))
>>> a
['cherry', 'pear', 'apple']

You could do this:

import re
import string
set1={'Apple.good','Orange.good','Pear.bad','Pear.good','Banana.bad','Potato.bad'}

for x in set1:
    x.replace('.good',' ')
    x.replace('.bad',' ')
    x = re.sub('\.good$', '', x)
    x = re.sub('\.bad$', '', x)
    print(x)

I did the test (but it is not your example) and the data does not return them orderly or complete

>>> ind = ['p5','p1','p8','p4','p2','p8']
>>> newind = {x.replace('p','') for x in ind}
>>> newind
{'1', '2', '8', '5', '4'}

I proved that this works:

>>> ind = ['p5','p1','p8','p4','p2','p8']
>>> newind = [x.replace('p','') for x in ind]
>>> newind
['5', '1', '8', '4', '2', '8']

or

>>> newind = []
>>> ind = ['p5','p1','p8','p4','p2','p8']
>>> for x in ind:
...     newind.append(x.replace('p',''))
>>> newind
['5', '1', '8', '4', '2', '8']

When there are multiple substrings to remove, one simple and effective option is to use re.sub with a compiled pattern that involves joining all the substrings-to-remove using the regex OR (|) pipe.

import re

to_remove = ['.good', '.bad']
strings = ['Apple.good','Orange.good','Pear.bad']

p = re.compile('|'.join(map(re.escape, to_remove))) # escape to handle metachars
[p.sub('', s) for s in strings]
# ['Apple', 'Orange', 'Pear']

If list

I was doing something for a list which is a set of strings and you want to remove all lines that have a certain substring you can do this

import re
def RemoveInList(sub,LinSplitUnOr):
    indices = [i for i, x in enumerate(LinSplitUnOr) if re.search(sub, x)]
    A = [i for j, i in enumerate(LinSplitUnOr) if j not in indices]
    return A

where sub is a patter that you do not wish to have in a list of lines LinSplitUnOr

for example

A=['Apple.good','Orange.good','Pear.bad','Pear.good','Banana.bad','Potato.bad']
sub = 'good'
A=RemoveInList(sub,A)

Then A will be

if you delete something from list , u can use this way : (method sub is case sensitive)

new_list = []
old_list= ["ABCDEFG","HKLMNOP","QRSTUV"]

for data in old_list:
     new_list.append(re.sub("AB|M|TV", " ", data))

print(new_list) // output : [' CDEFG', 'HKL NOP', 'QRSTUV']