["python","csv"]
How do you replace all the occurrences of a certain character in a string?

I am reading a csv into a: import csv import collections import pdb import math import urllib def do_work(): a=get_file('c:/pythonwork/cds/cds.csv') a=remove_chars(a) print a[0:10] def get_file(start_file): #opens original file, reads it to array with open(start_file,'rb') as f: data=list(csv.reader(f)) return (data) def remove_chars(a): badchars=['a','b','c','d'] for row in a: for letter in badchars: row[8].replace(letter,'') return a I would like to replace all occurrences of ['a','b','c','d'] in the 8th element of the line with empty string. the remove_chars function is not working. Is there a better way to do this?
The problem is that you are not doing anything with the result of replace. In Python strings are immutable so anything that manipulates a string returns a new string instead of modifying the original string. line[8] = line[8].replace(letter, "")