Replacing strings of weekdays ("MON", "TUE" etc.) in a list with the corresponding weekday numbers

I have the user select a strings of weekdays which then get stored in a list. My goal is to replace any user-selected strings with it’s corresponding weekday number. My code works but it seems unnecessarily bulky. Is there a more elegant way?

selected_weekdays = ["MON", "WED", "THU", "SAT"]

for i in range(len (selected_weekdays)):
    if selected_weekdays[i] == "MON":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 0
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "TUE":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 1
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "WED":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 2
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "THU":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 3
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "FRI":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 4
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "SAT":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 5
    elif selected_weekdays[i] == "SUN":
        selected_weekdays[i] = 6
    else:
        pass

print(selected_weekdays)

Correct output:

[0, 2, 3, 5]

>Solution :

You can avoid some extra work by generating your dictionary mapping

it’s also better to avoid modifying a structure you’re also iterating over for a variety of reasons
See Modifying list while iterating

The dictionary .get() method will choose a default choice (weekday in your original case, though you may want to change this such that it’s one of

• the unlisted weekday (this is what your code currently does, so I kept the results the same)
• an Exception (KeyError from directly indexing [] .. you may want this to highlight errors)
• None (essentially throws out bad values and is easy to filter in a next step)

# dictionary expression
weekday_mapping = {day: index for index, day in enumerate((
    "MON", "TUE", "WED", "THU", "FRI", "SAT", "SUN"))}

selected_weekdays = ["MON", "WED", "THU", "SAT"]
results = []
for weekday in selected_weekdays:
    results.append(weekday_mapping.get(weekday, weekday))

>>> results
[0, 2, 3, 5]
>>> selected_weekdays = ["MON", "WED", "THU", "FakeDay", "SAT"]
...
>>> results
[0, 2, 3, 'FakeDay', 5]