rreplace - How to replace the last occurrence of an expression in a string?

>>> def rreplace(s, old, new, occurrence):
...  li = s.rsplit(old, occurrence)
...  return new.join(li)
... 
>>> s
'1232425'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 2)
'123 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 3)
'1 3 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 4)
'1 3 4 5'
>>> rreplace(s, '2', ' ', 0)
'1232425'

I'm not going to pretend that this is the most efficient way of doing it, but it's a simple way. It reverses all the strings in question, performs an ordinary replacement using str.replace on the reversed strings, then reverses the result back the right way round:

>>> def rreplace(s, old, new, count):
...     return (s[::-1].replace(old[::-1], new[::-1], count))[::-1]
...
>>> rreplace('<div><div>Hello</div></div>', '</div>', '</bad>', 1)
'<div><div>Hello</div></bad>'

Here is a one-liner:

result = new.join(s.rsplit(old, maxreplace))

Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. The first maxreplace occurrences are replaced.

and a full example of this in use:

s = 'mississipi'
old = 'iss'
new = 'XXX'
maxreplace = 1

result = new.join(s.rsplit(old, maxreplace))
>>> result
'missXXXipi'