replace multiple substrings in a string.

replacer.py

from functools import reduce

# Lets define a helper method to make it easy to use
def replacer(text, replacements):
    return reduce(
        lambda text, ptuple: text.replace(ptuple[0], ptuple[1]),
        replacements, text
    )


if __name__ == '__main__':
    uncleaned_str = "abc&d&ef#ghi"
    cleaned_str = replacer(uncleaned_str, [("&", "\&"), ("#", "\#")])
    print(cleaned_str)  # "abc\&def\#ghi"