What is the simplest way to swap each pair of adjoining chars in a string with Python?

oneliner:

>>> s = 'badcfe'
>>> ''.join([ s[x:x+2][::-1] for x in range(0, len(s), 2) ])
'abcdef'

• s[x:x+2] returns string slice from x to x+2; it is safe for odd len(s).
• [::-1] reverses the string in Python
• range(0, len(s), 2) returns 0, 2, 4, 6 ... while x < len(s)

The usual way to swap two items in Python is:

a, b = b, a

So it would seem to me that you would just do the same with an extended slice. However, it is slightly complicated because strings aren't mutable; so you have to convert to a list and then back to a string.
Therefore, I would do the following:

>>> s = 'badcfe'
>>> t = list(s)
>>> t[::2], t[1::2] = t[1::2], t[::2]
>>> ''.join(t)
'abcdef'

Here's one way...

>>> s = '2134'
>>> def swap(c, i, j):
...  c = list(c)
...  c[i], c[j] = c[j], c[i]
...  return ''.join(c)
...
>>> swap(s, 0, 1)
'1234'
>>>