changer.py

from abbreviations import abbreviations
from sys import argv
import re

# get all the commandline text
in_str = ' '.join(argv[1:]).upper()

# compile a regular expression for each of the stations, do this only on startup, because it is slow (~240 ms)
abb_re = {}
for k, v in abbreviations.iteritems():
  abb_re[re.compile(r'[^A-Z0-9]' + k + r'[^A-Z0-9]')] = v

# Do the actual replacement, this is fairly fast (~10ms)
for k, v in abb_re.iteritems():
  in_str = k.sub(v, in_str)

print in_str