Shortening str.replace()

Question

In Python it is often necessary to use str.replace(a,b), however .replace is rather long and feels unnecessary. So is there a shorter alternative to str.replace.

Alternatively is there a similar trick to how you can use r=range for golfing for str.replace?

Example code for golfing

m=input()
f="hello"
print m.replace('t','Ushd')
print m.replace('h','gyhj')
print f.replace('o','%£&')

Answer 1

r=str.replace;print r('abc','b','c')

The magic is real.

Shortening str.replace()

Answer 2

Regex Replace

You can use re.sub, but it will take several uses to pay off if you're only doing it one character at a time.

import re
s="hello"
r=s.replace('h','m')
r=re.sub('h','m',s)

Translate

You may also wish to look at string.translate, which can be used for large numbers of single-character replacements. Requires Python 3. If using Python 2, maketrans is required first. For an example, see here. In Python 3, it's used like this (taking a literal dictionary of ASCII values):

print("hello".translate({104:109}))

Output:

mello