finding and replacing elements in a list

List comprehension works well, and looping through with enumerate can save you some memory (b/c the operation's essentially being done in place).

There's also functional programming. See usage of map:

>>> a = [1,2,3,2,3,4,3,5,6,6,5,4,5,4,3,4,3,2,1]
>>> map(lambda x: x if x != 4 else 'sss', a)
[1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 'sss', 3, 5, 6, 6, 5, 'sss', 5, 'sss', 3, 'sss', 3, 2, 1]

If you have several values to replace, you can also use a dictionary:

a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 1]
replacements = {1:10, 2:20, 3:'foo'}
replacer = replacements.get  # For faster gets.

print([replacer(n, n) for n in a])

> [10, 20, 'foo', 4, 10, 5, 'foo', 20, 6, 10, 10]

Note that this approach works only if the elements to be replaced are hashable. This is because dict keys are required to be hashable.

Try using a list comprehension and a conditional expression.

>>> a=[1,2,3,1,3,2,1,1]
>>> [4 if x==1 else x for x in a]
[4, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4, 4]

You can use the built-in enumerate to get both index and value while iterating the list. Then, use the value to test for a condition and the index to replace that value in the original list:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1]
>>> for i, n in enumerate(a):
...   if n == 1:
...      a[i] = 10
...
>>> a
[10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10]