How to use a list of numbers as index inputs

So I have a list of numbers (answer_index) which correlate to the index locations (indicies) of a characters (char) in a word (word). I would like to use the numbers in the list as index inputs later (indexes) on in code to replace every character except my chosen character(char) with "*" so that the final print (new_word) in this instance would be (****ee) instead of (coffee). it is important that (word) maintains it’s original value while (new_word) becomes the modified version. Does anyone have a solution for turning a list into valid index inputs? I will also except easier ways to meet my goal. (Note: I am extremely new to python so I’m sure my code looks horrendous) Code below:

word = 'coffee' 
print(word)
def find(string, char):
  for i, c in enumerate(string):
        if c == char:
            yield i

string = word
char = "e"
indices = (list(find(string, char)))
answer_index = (list(indices))
print(answer_index)
for t in range(0, len(answer_index)):
 answer_index[t] = int(answer_index[t])
indexes = [(answer_index)] 
new_character = '*' 
result = '' 
for i in indexes:
    new_word = word[:i] + new_character + word[i+1:] 
print(new_word)

>Solution :

The easiest and fastest way to replace all characters except some is to use regular expression substitution. In this case, it would look something like:

import re
re.sub('[^e]', '*', 'coffee')  # returns '****ee'

Here, [^...] is a pattern for negative character match. '[^e]' will match (and then replace) anything except "e".

Other options include decomposing the string into an iterable of characters (@PaulM’s answer) or working with bytearray instead