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Replace multiple equal strings in a word with list of strings from JSON

I'm having trouble with a script to replace the normal letters to especial characters to test a translation system, here's an example (cha-mate is chá-mate but would be tested with chã-mate/chã-máte and other variations), but instead of creating this variations, it's switching all of the same characters to only one espcial letter, here's what it's printing:
chá-máte
chã-mãte
Here's what should print in theory:
cha-máte
cha-mãte
chá-mate
chã-mate
etc.
Here's the code and the json utilized:
def translation_tester(word):
esp_chars = {
'a': 'áã',
}
#words = [word]
for esp_char in esp_chars:
if esp_char in word:
replacement_chars = esp_chars[esp_char]
for i in range(len(replacement_chars)):
print(word.replace(esp_char, replacement_chars[i]))
def main():
words = ['cha-mate']
for word in words:
translation_tester(word)
main()
Anyway, any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

To handle arbitrary number of replacements, you need to use recursion. This is how I did it.
intword = 'cha-mate'
esp_chars = {'a': 'áã'}
def wpermute(word, i=0):
for idx, c in enumerate(word[i:], i):
if c in esp_chars:
for s in esp_chars[c]:
newword = word[0:idx] + s + word[idx + 1:]
wpermute(newword, idx + 1)
if idx == len(word) -1:
print(word)
wpermute(intword)
which gives the output of 9 different ways the word can be written.
chá-máte
chá-mãte
chá-mate
chã-máte
chã-mãte
chã-mate
cha-máte
cha-mãte
cha-mate

There might be a nicer way to do this, but you can do the following (making sure to include the plain 'a' in the list of replacement chars):
import itertools
import re
def replace_at_indices(word, new_chars, indices):
new_word = word
for i, index in enumerate(indices):
new_word = new_word[:index] + new_chars[i] + new_word[index+1:]
return new_word
def translation_tester(word):
esp_chars = {
'a': 'aáã',
}
for esp_char in esp_chars:
replacement_chars = list(esp_chars[esp_char])
indices = [m.start() for m in re.finditer(esp_char, word)]
product = list(itertools.product(replacement_chars, repeat=len(indices)))
for p in product:
new_word = replace_at_indices(word, p, indices)
print(new_word)
def main():
words = ['cha-mate']
for word in words:
translation_tester(word)
main()
For your example, this should give you:
cha-mate
cha-máte
cha-mãte
chá-mate
chá-máte
chá-mãte
chã-mate
chã-máte
chã-mãte
See also:
Find all occurrences of a substring in Python
generating permutations with repetitions in python
Replacing a character from a certain index

Finding repeated character combinations in string

I have a string that holds a very long sentence without whitespaces/spaces.
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
I would like to find all of the repeated substrings that contains minimum 4 chars.
So I would like to achieve something like this:
'text' 2 times
'sample' 2 times
'abcd' 2 times
As both abcd,text and sample can be found two times in the mystring they were recognized as properly matched substrings with more than 4 char length. It's important that I am seeking repeated substrings, finding only existing English words is not a requirement.
The answers I found are helpful for finding duplicates in texts with whitespaces, but I couldn't find a proper resource that covers the situation when there are no spaces and whitespaces in the string. How can this be done in the most efficient way?

Let's go through this step by step. There are several sub-tasks you should take care of:
Identify all substrings of length 4 or more.
Count the occurrence of these substrings.
Filter all substrings with 2 occurrences or more.
You can actually put all of them into a few statements. For understanding, it is easier to go through them one at a time.
The following examples all use
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
min_length = 4
1. Substrings of a given length
You can easily get substrings by slicing - for example, mystring[4:4+6] gives you the substring from position 4 of length 6: 'thisis'. More generically, you want substrings of the form mystring[start:start+length].
So what values do you need for start and length?
start must...
cover all substrings, so it must include the first character: start in range(0, ...).
not map to short substrings, so it can stop min_length characters before the end: start in range(..., len(mystring) - min_length + 1).
length must...
cover the shortest substring of length 4: length in range(min_length, ...).
not exceed the remaining string after i: length in range(..., len(mystring) - i + 1))
The +1 terms come from converting lengths (>=1) to indices (>=0).
You can put this all together into a single comprehension:
substrings = [
mystring[i:i+j]
for i in range(0, len(mystring) - min_length + 1)
for j in range(min_length, len(mystring) - i + 1)
]
2. Count substrings
Trivially, you want to keep a count for each substring. Keeping anything for each specific object is what dicts are made for. So you should use substrings as keys and counts as values in a dict. In essence, this corresponds to this:
counts = {}
for substring in substrings:
try: # increase count for existing keys, set for new keys
counts[substring] += 1
except KeyError:
counts[substring] = 1
You can simply feed your substrings to collections.Counter, and it produces something like the above.
>>> counts = collections.Counter(substrings)
>>> print(counts)
Counter({'abcd': 2, 'abcdt': 1, 'abcdth': 1, 'abcdthi': 1, 'abcdthis': 1, ...})
Notice how the duplicate 'abcd' maps to the count of 2.
3. Filtering duplicate substrings
So now you have your substrings and the count for each. You need to remove the non-duplicate substrings - those with a count of 1.
Python offers several constructs for filtering, depending on the output you want. These work also if counts is a regular dict:
>>> list(filter(lambda key: counts[key] > 1, counts))
['abcd', 'text', 'samp', 'sampl', 'sample', 'ampl', 'ample', 'mple']
>>> {key: value for key, value in counts.items() if value > 1}
{'abcd': 2, 'ampl': 2, 'ample': 2, 'mple': 2, 'samp': 2, 'sampl': 2, 'sample': 2, 'text': 2}
Using Python primitives
Python ships with primitives that allow you to do this more efficiently.
Use a generator to build substrings. A generator builds its member on the fly, so you never actually have them all in-memory. For your use case, you can use a generator expression:
substrings = (
mystring[i:i+j]
for i in range(0, len(mystring) - min_length + 1)
for j in range(min_length, len(mystring) - i + 1)
)
Use a pre-existing Counter implementation. Python comes with a dict-like container that counts its members: collections.Counter can directly digest your substring generator. Especially in newer version, this is much more efficient.
counts = collections.Counter(substrings)
You can exploit Python's lazy filters to only ever inspect one substring. The filter builtin or another generator generator expression can produce one result at a time without storing them all in memory.
for substring in filter(lambda key: counts[key] > 1, counts):
print(substring, 'occurs', counts[substring], 'times')

Nobody is using re! Time for an answer [ab]using the regular expression built-in module ;)
import re
Finding all the maximal substrings that are repeated
repeated_ones = set(re.findall(r"(.{4,})(?=.*\1)", mystring))
This matches the longest substrings which have at least a single repetition after (without consuming). So it finds all disjointed substrings that are repeated while only yielding the longest strings.
Finding all substrings that are repeated, including overlaps
mystring_overlap = "abcdeabcdzzzzbcde"
# In case we want to match both abcd and bcde
repeated_ones = set()
pos = 0
while True:
match = re.search(r"(.{4,}).*(\1)+", mystring_overlap[pos:])
if match:
repeated_ones.add(match.group(1))
pos += match.pos + 1
else:
break
This ensures that all --not only disjoint-- substrings which have repetition are returned. It should be much slower, but gets the work done.
If you want in addition to the longest strings that are repeated, all the substrings, then:
base_repetitions = list(repeated_ones)
for s in base_repetitions:
for i in range(4, len(s)):
repeated_ones.add(s[:i])
That will ensure that for long substrings that have repetition, you have also the smaller substring --e.g. "sample" and "ample" found by the re.search code; but also "samp", "sampl", "ampl" added by the above snippet.
Counting matches
Because (by design) the substrings that we count are non-overlapping, the count method is the way to go:
from __future__ import print_function
for substr in repeated_ones:
print("'%s': %d times" % (substr, mystring.count(substr)))
Results
Finding maximal substrings:
With the question's original mystring:
{'abcd', 'text', 'sample'}
with the mystring_overlap sample:
{'abcd'}
Finding all substrings:
With the question's original mystring:
{'abcd', 'ample', 'mple', 'sample', 'text'}
... and if we add the code to get all substrings then, of course, we get absolutely all the substrings:
{'abcd', 'ampl', 'ample', 'mple', 'samp', 'sampl', 'sample', 'text'}
with the mystring_overlap sample:
{'abcd', 'bcde'}
Future work
It's possible to filter the results of the finding all substrings with the following steps:
take a match "A"
check if this match is a substring of another match, call it "B"
if there is a "B" match, check the counter on that match "B_n"
if "A_n = B_n", then remove A
go to first step
It cannot happen that "A_n < B_n" because A is smaller than B (is a substring) so there must be at least the same number of repetitions.
If "A_n > B_n" it means that there is some extra match of the smaller substring, so it is a distinct substring because it is repeated in a place where B is not repeated.

Script (explanation where needed, in comments):
from collections import Counter
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
mystring_len = len(mystring)
possible_matches = []
matches = []
# Range `start_index` from 0 to 3 from the left, due to minimum char count of 4
for start_index in range(0, mystring_len-3):
# Start `end_index` at `start_index+1` and range it throughout the rest of
# the string
for end_index in range(start_index+1, mystring_len+1):
current_string = mystring[start_index:end_index]
if len(current_string) < 4: continue # Skip this interation, if len < 4
possible_matches.append(mystring[start_index:end_index])
for possible_match, count in Counter(possible_matches).most_common():
# Iterate until count is less than or equal to 1 because `Counter`'s
# `most_common` method lists them in order. Once 1 (or less) is hit, all
# others are the same or lower.
if count <= 1: break
matches.append((possible_match, count))
for match, count in matches:
print(f'\'{match}\' {count} times')
Output:
'abcd' 2 times
'text' 2 times
'samp' 2 times
'sampl' 2 times
'sample' 2 times
'ampl' 2 times
'ample' 2 times
'mple' 2 times

Here's a Python3 friendly solution:
from collections import Counter
min_str_length = 4
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
all_substrings =[mystring[start_index:][:end_index + 1] for start_index in range(len(mystring)) for end_index in range(len(mystring[start_index:]))]
counted_substrings = Counter(all_substrings)
not_counted_final_candidates = [item[0] for item in counted_substrings.most_common() if item[1] > 1 and len(item[0]) >= min_str_length]
counted_final_candidates = {item: counted_substrings[item] for item in not_counted_final_candidates}
print(counted_final_candidates)
Bonus: largest string
sub_sub_strings = [substring1 for substring1 in not_counted_final_candidates for substring2 in not_counted_final_candidates if substring1!=substring2 and substring1 in substring2 ]
largest_common_string = list(set(not_counted_final_candidates) - set(sub_sub_strings))
Everything as a function:
from collections import Counter
def get_repeated_strings(input_string, min_str_length = 2, calculate_largest_repeated_string = True ):
all_substrings = [input_string[start_index:][:end_index + 1]
for start_index in range(len(input_string))
for end_index in range(len(input_string[start_index:]))]
counted_substrings = Counter(all_substrings)
not_counted_final_candidates = [item[0]
for item in counted_substrings.most_common()
if item[1] > 1 and len(item[0]) >= min_str_length]
counted_final_candidates = {item: counted_substrings[item] for item in not_counted_final_candidates}
### This is just a bit of bonus code for calculating the largest repeating sting
if calculate_largest_repeated_string == True:
sub_sub_strings = [substring1 for substring1 in not_counted_final_candidates for substring2 in
not_counted_final_candidates if substring1 != substring2 and substring1 in substring2]
largest_common_strings = list(set(not_counted_final_candidates) - set(sub_sub_strings))
return counted_final_candidates, largest_common_strings
else:
return counted_final_candidates
Example:
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
print(get_repeated_strings(mystring, min_str_length= 4))
Output:
({'abcd': 2, 'text': 2, 'samp': 2, 'sampl': 2, 'sample': 2, 'ampl': 2, 'ample': 2, 'mple': 2}, ['abcd', 'text', 'sample'])

CODE:
pattern = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
string_more_4 = []
k = 4
while(k <= len(pattern)):
for i in range(len(pattern)):
if pattern[i:k+i] not in string_more_4 and len(pattern[i:k+i]) >= 4:
string_more_4.append( pattern[i:k+i])
k+=1
for i in string_more_4:
if pattern.count(i) >= 2:
print(i + " -> " + str(pattern.count(i)) + " times")
OUTPUT:
abcd -> 2 times
text -> 2 times
samp -> 2 times
ampl -> 2 times
mple -> 2 times
sampl -> 2 times
ample -> 2 times
sample -> 2 times
Hope this helps as my code length was short and it is easy to understand. Cheers!

This is in Python 2 because I'm not doing Python 3 at this time. So you'll have to adapt it to Python 3 yourself.
#!python2
# import module
from collections import Counter
# get the indices
def getIndices(length):
# holds the indices
specific_range = []; all_sets = []
# start building the indices
for i in range(0, length - 2):
# build a set of indices of a specific range
for j in range(1, length + 2):
specific_range.append([j - 1, j + i + 3])
# append 'specific_range' to 'all_sets', reset 'specific_range'
if specific_range[j - 1][1] == length:
all_sets.append(specific_range)
specific_range = []
break
# return all of the calculated indices ranges
return all_sets
# store search strings
tmplst = []; combos = []; found = []
# string to be searched
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
# mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithtextsampletextforasampleabcdtext"
# get length of string
length = len(mystring)
# get all of the indices ranges, 4 and greater
all_sets = getIndices(length)
# get the search string combinations
for sublst in all_sets:
for subsublst in sublst:
tmplst.append(mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]])
combos.append(tmplst)
tmplst = []
# search for matching string patterns
for sublst in all_sets:
for subsublst in sublst:
for sublstitems in combos:
if mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]] in sublstitems:
found.append(mystring[subsublst[0]: subsublst[1]])
# make a dictionary containing the strings and their counts
d1 = Counter(found)
# filter out counts of 2 or more and print them
for k, v in d1.items():
if v > 1:
print k, v

$ cat test.py
import collections
import sys
S = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
def find(s, min_length=4):
"""
Find repeated character sequences in a provided string.
Arguments:
s -- the string to be searched
min_length -- the minimum length of the sequences to be found
"""
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
# A repeated sequence can't be longer than half the length of s
sequence_length = len(s) // 2
# populate counter with all possible sequences
while sequence_length >= min_length:
# Iterate over the string until the number of remaining characters is
# fewer than the length of the current sequence.
for i, x in enumerate(s[:-(sequence_length - 1)]):
# Window across the string, getting slices
# of length == sequence_length.
candidate = s[i:i + sequence_length]
counter[candidate] += 1
sequence_length -= 1
# Report.
for k, v in counter.items():
if v > 1:
print('{} {} times'.format(k, v))
return
if __name__ == '__main__':
try:
s = sys.argv[1]
except IndexError:
s = S
find(s)
$ python test.py
sample 2 times
sampl 2 times
ample 2 times
abcd 2 times
text 2 times
samp 2 times
ampl 2 times
mple 2 times

This is my approach to this problem:
def get_repeated_words(string, minimum_len):
# Storing count of repeated words in this dictionary
repeated_words = {}
# Traversing till last but 4th element
# Actually leaving `minimum_len` elements at end (in this case its 4)
for i in range(len(string)-minimum_len):
# Starting with a length of 4(`minimum_len`) and going till end of string
for j in range(i+minimum_len, len(string)):
# getting the current word
word = string[i:j]
# counting the occurrences of the word
word_count = string.count(word)
if word_count > 1:
# storing in dictionary along with its count if found more than once
repeated_words[word] = word_count
return repeated_words
if __name__ == '__main__':
mystring = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
result = get_repeated_words(mystring, 4)

This is how I would do it, but I don't know any other way:
string = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
l = len(string)
occurences = {}
for i in range(4, l):
for start in range(l - i):
substring = string[start:start + i]
occurences[substring] = occurences.get(substring, 0) + 1
for key in occurences.keys():
if occurences[key] > 1:
print("'" + key + "'", str(occurences[key]), "times")
Output:
'sample' 2 times
'ampl' 2 times
'sampl' 2 times
'ample' 2 times
'samp' 2 times
'mple' 2 times
'text' 2 times
Efficient, no, but easy to understand, yes.

Here is simple solution using the more_itertools library.
Given
import collections as ct
import more_itertools as mit
s = "abcdthisisatextwithsampletextforasampleabcd"
lbound, ubound = len("abcd"), len(s)
Code
windows = mit.flatten(mit.windowed(s, n=i) for i in range(lbound, ubound))
filtered = {"".join(k): v for k, v in ct.Counter(windows).items() if v > 1}
filtered
Output
{'abcd': 2,
'text': 2,
'samp': 2,
'ampl': 2,
'mple': 2,
'sampl': 2,
'ample': 2,
'sample': 2}
Details
The procedures are:
build sliding windows of varying sizes lbound <= n < ubound
count all occurrences and filter replicates
more_itertools is a third-party package installed by > pip install more_itertools.

s = 'abcabcabcdabcd'
d = {}
def get_repeats(s, l):
for i in range(len(s)-l):
ss = s[i: i+l]
if ss not in d:
d[ss] = 1
else:
d[ss] = d[ss]+1
return d
get_repeats(s, 3)

Python string split join 4

import re
string = "is2 Thi1s T4est 3a"
def order(sentence):
res = ''
count = 1
list = sentence.split()
for i in list:
for i in list:
a = re.findall('\d+', i)
if a == [str(count)]:
res += " ".join(i)
count += 1
print(res)
order(string)
Above there is a code which I have problem with. Output which I should get is:
"Thi1s is2 3a T4est"
Instead I'm getting the correct order but with spaces in the wrong places:
"T h i 1 si s 23 aT 4 e s t"
Any idea how to make it work with this code concept?

You are joining the characters of each word:
>>> " ".join('Thi1s')
'T h i 1 s'
You want to collect your words into a list and join that instead:
def order(sentence):
number_words = []
count = 1
words = sentence.split()
for word in words:
for word in words:
matches = re.findall('\d+', word)
if matches == [str(count)]:
number_words.append(word)
count += 1
result = ' '.join(number_words)
print(result)
I used more verbose and clear variable names. I also removed the list variable; don't use list as a variable name if you can avoid it, as that masks the built-in list name.
What you implemented comes down to a O(N^2) (quadratic time) sort. You could instead use the built-in sort() function to bring this to O(NlogN); you'd extract the digit and sort on its integer value:
def order(sentence):
digit = re.compile(r'\d+')
return ' '.join(
sorted(sentence.split(),
key=lambda w: int(digit.search(w).group())))
This differs a little from your version in that it'll only look at the first (consecutive) digits, it doesn't care about the numbers being sequential, and will break for words without digits. It also uses a return to give the result to the caller rather than print. Just use print(order(string)) to print the return value.
If you assume the words are numbered consecutively starting at 1, then you can sort them in O(N) time even:
def order(sentence):
digit = re.compile(r'\d+')
words = sentence.split()
result = [None] * len(words)
for word in words:
index = int(digit.search(word).group())
result[index - 1] = word
return ' '.join(result)
This works by creating a list of the same length, then using the digits from each word to put the word into the correct index (minus 1, as Python lists start at 0, not 1).

I think the bug is simply in the misuse of join(). You want to concatenate the current sorted string. i is simply a token, hence simply add it to the end of the string. Code untested.
import re
string = "is2 Thi1s T4est 3a"
def order(sentence):
res = ''
count = 1
list = sentence.split()
for i in list:
for i in list:
a = re.findall('\d+', i)
if a == [str(count)]:
res = res + " " + i # your bug here
count += 1
print(res)
order(string)

How I display 2 words before and after a key search word in Python

Very new to Python programming. How I display 2 words before and after a key search word. In below example I am looking for a search word = lists
Sample:
Line 1: List of the keyboard shortcuts for Word 2000
Line 2: Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples - PythonLearn
Desired results (Lists word only found only in line 2)
Line 2: Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples
Thanks for your help in this.

This solution is based on Avinash Raj's second example with these amendments:
Allows the number of words to be printed each side of the search word to be varied
Uses a list comprehension instead of if inside for, which may be considered more 'Pythonic', though I'm not sure in this case if it's more readable.
.
s = """List of the keyboard shortcuts for Word 2000
Sequences: strings, lists and tuples - PythonLearn"""
findword = 'lists'
numwords = 2
for i in s.split('\n'):
z = i.split(' ')
for x in [x for (x, y) in enumerate(z) if findword in y]:
print(' '.join(z[max(x-numwords,0):x+numwords+1]))

Through re.findall function.
>>> s = """List of the keyboard shortcuts for Word 2000
Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples - PythonLearn"""
>>> re.findall(r'\S+ \S+ \S*\blists\S* \S+ \S+', s)
['Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples']
Without regex.
>>> s = """List of the keyboard shortcuts for Word 2000
Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples - PythonLearn"""
>>> for i in s.split('\n'):
z = i.split()
for x,y in enumerate(z):
if 'lists' in y:
print(z[x-2]+' '+z[x-1]+' '+z[x]+' '+z[x+1]+' '+z[x+2])
Sequences: strings, lists, and tuples

This is the solution I can think of right away for your question :-)
def get_word_list(line, keyword, length, splitter):
word_list = line.split(keyword)
if len(word_list) == 1:
return []
search_result = []
temp_result = ""
index = 0
while index < len(word_list):
result = word_list[index].strip().split(splitter, length-1)[-1]
result += " " + keyword
if index+1 > len(word_list):
search_result.append(result.strip())
break
right_string = word_list[index+1].lstrip(" ").split(splitter, length+1)[:length]
print word_list[index+1].lstrip(), right_string
result += " " + " ".join(right_string)
search_result.append(result.strip())
index += 2
return search_result
def search(file, keyword, length=2, splitter= " "):
search_results = []
with open(file, "r") as fo:
for line in fo:
line = line.strip()
search_results += get_word_list(line, keyword, length, splitter)
for result in search_results:
print "Result:", result

Python: How to replace N random string occurrences in text?

Say that I have 10 different tokens, "(TOKEN)" in a string. How do I replace 2 of those tokens, chosen at random, with some other string, leaving the other tokens intact?

>>> import random
>>> text = '(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)'
>>> token = '(TOKEN)'
>>> replace = 'foo'
>>> num_replacements = 2
>>> num_tokens = text.count(token) #10 in this case
>>> points = [0] + sorted(random.sample(range(1,num_tokens+1),num_replacements)) + [num_tokens+1]
>>> replace.join(token.join(text.split(token)[i:j]) for i,j in zip(points,points[1:]))
'(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__foo__(TOKEN)__foo__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)__(TOKEN)'
In function form:
>>> def random_replace(text, token, replace, num_replacements):
num_tokens = text.count(token)
points = [0] + sorted(random.sample(range(1,num_tokens+1),num_replacements)) + [num_tokens+1]
return replace.join(token.join(text.split(token)[i:j]) for i,j in zip(points,points[1:]))
>>> random_replace('....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....','(TOKEN)','FOO',2)
'....FOO....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....(TOKEN)....FOO....'
Test:
>>> for i in range(0,9):
print random_replace('....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....','(0)','(%d)'%i,i)
....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....
....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(1)....(0)....(0)....(0)....
....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(0)....(2)....(2)....(0)....
....(3)....(0)....(0)....(3)....(0)....(3)....(0)....(0)....
....(4)....(4)....(0)....(0)....(4)....(4)....(0)....(0)....
....(0)....(5)....(5)....(5)....(5)....(0)....(0)....(5)....
....(6)....(6)....(6)....(0)....(6)....(0)....(6)....(6)....
....(7)....(7)....(7)....(7)....(7)....(7)....(0)....(7)....
....(8)....(8)....(8)....(8)....(8)....(8)....(8)....(8)....

If you need exactly two, then:
Detect the tokens (keep some links to them, like index into the string)
Choose two at random (random.choice)
Replace them

What are you trying to do, exactly? A good answer will depend on that...
That said, a brute-force solution that comes to mind is to:
Store the 10 tokens in an array, such that tokens[0] is the first token, tokens[1] is the second, ... and so on
Create a dictionary to associate each unique "(TOKEN)" with two numbers: start_idx, end_idx
Write a little parser that walks through your string and looks for each of the 10 tokens. Whenever one is found, record the start/end indexes (as start_idx, end_idx) in the string where that token occurs.
Once done parsing, generate a random number in the range [0,9]. Lets call this R
Now, your random "(TOKEN)" is tokens[R];
Use the dictionary in step (3) to find the start_idx, end_idx values in the string; replace the text there with "some other string"

My solution in code:
import random
s = "(TOKEN)test(TOKEN)fgsfds(TOKEN)qwerty(TOKEN)42(TOKEN)(TOKEN)ttt"
replace_from = "(TOKEN)"
replace_to = "[REPLACED]"
amount_to_replace = 2
def random_replace(s, replace_from, replace_to, amount_to_replace):
parts = s.split(replace_from)
indices = random.sample(xrange(len(parts) - 1), amount_to_replace)
replaced_s_parts = list()
for i in xrange(len(parts)):
replaced_s_parts.append(parts[i])
if i < len(parts) - 1:
if i in indices:
replaced_s_parts.append(replace_to)
else:
replaced_s_parts.append(replace_from)
return "".join(replaced_s_parts)
#TEST
for i in xrange(5):
print random_replace(s, replace_from, replace_to, 2)
Explanation:
Splits string into several parts using replace_from
Chooses indexes of tokens to replace using random.sample. This returned list contains unique numbers
Build a list for string reconstruction, replacing tokens with generated index by replace_to.
Concatenate all list elements into single string

Try this solution:
import random
def replace_random(tokens, eqv, n):
random_tokens = eqv.keys()
random.shuffle(random_tokens)
for i in xrange(n):
t = random_tokens[i]
tokens = tokens.replace(t, eqv[t])
return tokens
Assuming that a string with tokens exists, and a suitable equivalence table can be constructed with a replacement for each token:
tokens = '(TOKEN1) (TOKEN2) (TOKEN3) (TOKEN4) (TOKEN5) (TOKEN6) (TOKEN7) (TOKEN8) (TOKEN9) (TOKEN10)'
equivalences = {
'(TOKEN1)' : 'REPLACEMENT1',
'(TOKEN2)' : 'REPLACEMENT2',
'(TOKEN3)' : 'REPLACEMENT3',
'(TOKEN4)' : 'REPLACEMENT4',
'(TOKEN5)' : 'REPLACEMENT5',
'(TOKEN6)' : 'REPLACEMENT6',
'(TOKEN7)' : 'REPLACEMENT7',
'(TOKEN8)' : 'REPLACEMENT8',
'(TOKEN9)' : 'REPLACEMENT9',
'(TOKEN10)' : 'REPLACEMENT10'
}
You can call it like this:
replace_random(tokens, equivalences, 2)
> '(TOKEN1) REPLACEMENT2 (TOKEN3) (TOKEN4) (TOKEN5) (TOKEN6) (TOKEN7) (TOKEN8) REPLACEMENT9 (TOKEN10)'

There are lots of ways to do this. My approach would be to write a function that takes the original string, the token string, and a function that returns the replacement text for an occurrence of the token in the original:
def strByReplacingTokensUsingFunction(original, token, function):
outputComponents = []
matchNumber = 0
unexaminedOffset = 0
while True:
matchOffset = original.find(token, unexaminedOffset)
if matchOffset < 0:
matchOffset = len(original)
outputComponents.append(original[unexaminedOffset:matchOffset])
if matchOffset == len(original):
break
unexaminedOffset = matchOffset + len(token)
replacement = function(original=original, offset=matchOffset, matchNumber=matchNumber, token=token)
outputComponents.append(replacement)
matchNumber += 1
return ''.join(outputComponents)
(You could certainly change this to use shorter identifiers. My style is somewhat more verbose than typical Python style.)
Given that function, it's easy to replace two random occurrences out of ten. Here's some sample input:
sampleInput = 'a(TOKEN)b(TOKEN)c(TOKEN)d(TOKEN)e(TOKEN)f(TOKEN)g(TOKEN)h(TOKEN)i(TOKEN)j(TOKEN)k'
The random module has a handy method for picking random items from a population (not picking the same item twice):
import random
replacementIndexes = random.sample(range(10), 2)
Then we can use the function above to replace the randomly-chosen occurrences:
sampleOutput = strByReplacingTokensUsingFunction(sampleInput, '(TOKEN)',
(lambda matchNumber, token, **keywords:
'REPLACEMENT' if (matchNumber in replacementIndexes) else token))
print sampleOutput
And here's some test output:
a(TOKEN)b(TOKEN)cREPLACEMENTd(TOKEN)e(TOKEN)fREPLACEMENTg(TOKEN)h(TOKEN)i(TOKEN)j(TOKEN)k
Here's another run:
a(TOKEN)bREPLACEMENTc(TOKEN)d(TOKEN)e(TOKEN)f(TOKEN)gREPLACEMENTh(TOKEN)i(TOKEN)j(TOKEN)k

from random import sample
mystr = 'adad(TOKEN)hgfh(TOKEN)hjgjh(TOKEN)kjhk(TOKEN)jkhjk(TOKEN)utuy(TOKEN)tyuu(TOKEN)tyuy(TOKEN)tyuy(TOKEN)tyuy(TOKEN)'
def replace(mystr, substr, n_repl, replacement='XXXXXXX', tokens=10, index=0):
choices = sorted(sample(xrange(tokens),n_repl))
for i in xrange(choices[-1]+1):
index = mystr.index(substr, index) + 1
if i in choices:
mystr = mystr[:index-1] + mystr[index-1:].replace(substr,replacement,1)
return mystr
print replace(mystr,'(TOKEN)',2)