One thing I feel a little bit not quite as intuitive when I switch to Python is I constantly have to look up whether the method directly updates the contents or it’ll return a different object (of the same type) that I’ll have to overwrite the input variable myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An example would be strings and bytes object. I initially thought this has to do with whether the object is immutable or not, but I tried it on bytearray objects (which is mutable), replace()<\/code> sounded like an updating method, but it’s actually a ‘const’ method (a term borrowed from C++ to say that the method does not have side-effects) that does not change the state of the object.<\/p>\n\n\n\nreplace()<\/code> behaves consistently with the identically named methods in other immutable objects (bytes object, string object): you’ll need to assign the output to self (basically bind the name to the temporary and throw away the original).<\/p>\n\n\n\nbts = b'test'\nbts.replace('es', 'oas') # dumps the output to workspace (can be accessed by _) and do nothing else\nbts = bts.replace('es', 'oas') # actually updates bts<\/pre>\n