Searching and replacing text in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Searching and replacing text

📖 Scenario: Imagine you have a short story saved as a string. You want to find and replace certain words to make the story more fun or correct mistakes.

🎯 Goal: You will create a program that searches for a specific word in a story and replaces it with another word.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a string variable with the story text

Create variables for the word to find and the word to replace it with

Use the string replace() method to change the word

Print the updated story

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Text editing and processing is common in writing apps, chat programs, and data cleaning.

💼 Career

Knowing how to search and replace text helps in software development, data analysis, and content management.

1

Create the story text

Create a string variable called story with this exact text: 'The cat sat on the mat.'

Python

# Create the story string variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use single or double quotes to create the string.

2

Set the word to find and replace

Create a variable called word_to_find and set it to 'cat'. Then create a variable called word_to_replace and set it to 'dog'.

Python

story = 'The cat sat on the mat.'
# Create word_to_find and word_to_replace variables
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use simple assignment to create these variables.

3

Replace the word in the story

Create a new variable called new_story that uses story.replace(word_to_find, word_to_replace) to replace the word.

Python

story = 'The cat sat on the mat.'
word_to_find = 'cat'
word_to_replace = 'dog'
# Replace word_to_find with word_to_replace in story
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the replace() method on the story string.

4

Print the updated story

Write a print() statement to display the new_story variable.

Python

story = 'The cat sat on the mat.'
word_to_find = 'cat'
word_to_replace = 'dog'
new_story = story.replace(word_to_find, word_to_replace)
# Print the new_story
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(new_story) to show the changed story.