find and replace

I am making the assumption that all the columns are character and not factors:

for (i in c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E")){
    yourdf[[i]] <- ifelse(yourdf[[i]] == 'x'
                    , 'y'
                    , ifelse(yourdf[[i]] == 'a'
                        , 'b'
                        , yourdf[[i]]
                        )
                    )
}

I have 5 (A,B,C,D,E) columns in my dataframe. I want to replace all "x" with "y" and all "a" with "b" within these 5 columns. Can I do it in one step?

Thanks
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