Class StringCleaner

Populate an instance with some defaults. The replacement dictionary needs to be set such that the most specific replacements occur last. This is because the replacements should be done in a certain order, for example ('C:\', '') should be done before (':', '') and ('\', ''), and because people tend to append to an iterable rather than prepend we will traverse the iterable backwards.

Parameters:

• extra_replacement_pairs (list of tuples) - each tuple in this list contains a single replacement pair, i.e. a single substring to be replaced and a single substring to replace it.
• separator (str) - in the case of non-unique strings this is the string that separates the non-unique part from the number of times used which is the unique part.

Overrides: object.__init__

Shorten if necessary, replace certain characters in an input string and then uniquify the string by comparing with a dictionary of previous names and number of times used.

Parameters:

• input_str (str) - the input string we want cleaned and uniqified
• clear_prev (bool) - specify if the dictionary of previous names should first be cleared
• max_len (int) - maximum length of the input_str allowed, otherwise it will be shortened to the max_len value

Returns: str

the input string now cleaned and uniquified