Leave only alphanumeric symbols in string in Python? - python

I am using Python 2.7. On SO I found the following regexp for removing non-word characters:
pat = re.compile('[\W]+', re.UNICODE)
I wrote the next function:
def leave_only_alphanumeric(string):
pat = re.compile('[\W]+', re.UNICODE)
return re.sub(pat,' ',string)
Though on the following string:
kr\xc3\xa9m
it produces the wrong result:
kr\xc3 m
\xa9 was deleted from the string, but should not have been.

You are confusing unicode codepoints and the utf-8 encoding.
The letter you are trying to handle is é, code point u00e9.
It is encoded in utf-8 as two bytes, 0xc3 and 0xa9.
Try:
>>> "kr\xc3\xa9m".decode('utf-8')
u'kr\xe9m'
>>> print("kr\xc3\xa9m")
krém
>>> print(u"kr\xe9m")
krém
With u"" you must use the actual code points. While with raw "", python just sees a chain of bytes.
Note that the second line only works because my terminal's encoding is utf-8, otherwise I'd see garbled output.
As a result, your string is not what you think:
>>> print(u"kr\xc3\xa9m")
krém
You actually entered two characters, with codepoint u00c3 and u00a9. The former is Ã, which is an alpha character and second is ©, which is not and is why your code removes it.
Now playing with your code:
>>> def leave_only_alphanumeric(string):
... pat = re.compile('[\W]+', re.UNICODE)
... return re.sub(pat,' ',string)
...
>>> leave_only_alphanumeric(u"kr\xe9m")
u'kr\xe9m'
>>> leave_only_alphanumeric("kr\xc3\xa9m") # this is not unicode
'kr\xc3 m' # -> thus the wrong result
>>> leave_only_alphanumeric("kr\xc3\xa9m".decode('utf-8'))
u'kr\xe9m'
>>> leave_only_alphanumeric("kr\xc3\xa9m".decode('utf-8')).encode('utf-8')
'kr\xc3\xa9m'
>>>

I believe regex might be a bit of an overkill here.
def leave_only_alphanumeric(string):
return ''.join(ch if ch.isalnum() else ' ' for ch in string)
EDIT: Your title says "alphanumeric" but your code removes digits as well. So there is a bit of unclarity.

Related

How to convert Unicode to ASCII leaving out the non-convertible characters? [duplicate]

I'm working with a .txt file. I want a string of the text from the file with no non-ASCII characters. However, I want to leave spaces and periods. At present, I'm stripping those too. Here's the code:
def onlyascii(char):
if ord(char) < 48 or ord(char) > 127: return ''
else: return char
def get_my_string(file_path):
f=open(file_path,'r')
data=f.read()
f.close()
filtered_data=filter(onlyascii, data)
filtered_data = filtered_data.lower()
return filtered_data
How should I modify onlyascii() to leave spaces and periods? I imagine it's not too complicated but I can't figure it out.
You can filter all characters from the string that are not printable using string.printable, like this:
>>> s = "some\x00string. with\x15 funny characters"
>>> import string
>>> printable = set(string.printable)
>>> filter(lambda x: x in printable, s)
'somestring. with funny characters'
string.printable on my machine contains:
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\\]^_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c
EDIT: On Python 3, filter will return an iterable. The correct way to obtain a string back would be:
''.join(filter(lambda x: x in printable, s))
An easy way to change to a different codec, is by using encode() or decode(). In your case, you want to convert to ASCII and ignore all symbols that are not supported. For example, the Swedish letter å is not an ASCII character:
>>>s = u'Good bye in Swedish is Hej d\xe5'
>>>s = s.encode('ascii',errors='ignore')
>>>print s
Good bye in Swedish is Hej d
Edit:
Python3: str -> bytes -> str
>>>"Hej då".encode("ascii", errors="ignore").decode()
'hej d'
Python2: unicode -> str -> unicode
>>> u"hej då".encode("ascii", errors="ignore").decode()
u'hej d'
Python2: str -> unicode -> str (decode and encode in reverse order)
>>> "hej d\xe5".decode("ascii", errors="ignore").encode()
'hej d'
According to #artfulrobot, this should be faster than filter and lambda:
import re
re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', your-non-ascii-string)
See more examples here Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space
You may use the following code to remove non-English letters:
import re
str = "123456790 ABC#%? .(朱惠英)"
result = re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', str)
print(result)
This will return
123456790 ABC#%? .()
Your question is ambiguous; the first two sentences taken together imply that you believe that space and "period" are non-ASCII characters. This is incorrect. All chars such that ord(char) <= 127 are ASCII characters. For example, your function excludes these characters !"#$%&\'()*+,-./ but includes several others e.g. []{}.
Please step back, think a bit, and edit your question to tell us what you are trying to do, without mentioning the word ASCII, and why you think that chars such that ord(char) >= 128 are ignorable. Also: which version of Python? What is the encoding of your input data?
Please note that your code reads the whole input file as a single string, and your comment ("great solution") to another answer implies that you don't care about newlines in your data. If your file contains two lines like this:
this is line 1
this is line 2
the result would be 'this is line 1this is line 2' ... is that what you really want?
A greater solution would include:
a better name for the filter function than onlyascii
recognition that a filter function merely needs to return a truthy value if the argument is to be retained:
def filter_func(char):
return char == '\n' or 32 <= ord(char) <= 126
# and later:
filtered_data = filter(filter_func, data).lower()
Working my way through Fluent Python (Ramalho) - highly recommended.
List comprehension one-ish-liners inspired by Chapter 2:
onlyascii = ''.join([s for s in data if ord(s) < 127])
onlymatch = ''.join([s for s in data if s in
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'])
If you want printable ascii characters you probably should correct your code to:
if ord(char) < 32 or ord(char) > 126: return ''
this is equivalent, to string.printable (answer from #jterrace), except for the absence of returns and tabs ('\t','\n','\x0b','\x0c' and '\r') but doesnt correspond to the range on your question
this is best way to get ascii characters and clean code, Checks for all possible errors
from string import printable
def getOnlyCharacters(texts):
_type = None
result = ''
if type(texts).__name__ == 'bytes':
_type = 'bytes'
texts = texts.decode('utf-8','ignore')
else:
_type = 'str'
texts = bytes(texts, 'utf-8').decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
texts = str(texts)
for text in texts:
if text in printable:
result += text
if _type == 'bytes':
result = result.encode('utf-8')
return result
text = '�Ahm�����ed Sheri��'
result = getOnlyCharacters(text)
print(result)
#input --> �Ahm�����ed Sheri��
#output --> Ahmed Sheri

How to get python to accept unicode character 0x2000 (and others)

I am trying to remove certain characters from a string in Python. I have a list of characters or range of characters that I need removed, represented in hexidecimal like so:
- "0x00:0x20"
- "0x7F:0xA0"
- "0x1680"
- "0x180E"
- "0x2000:0x200A"
I am turning this list into a regular expression that looks like this:
re.sub(u'[\x00-\x20 \x7F-\xA0 \x1680 \x180E \x2000-\x200A]', ' ', my_str)
However, I am getting an error when I have \x2000-\x200A in there.
I have found that Python does not actually interpret u'\x2000' as a character:
>>> '\x2000'
' 00'
It is treating it like 'x20' (a space) and whatever else is after it:
>>> '\x20blah'
' blah'
x2000 is a valid unicode character:
http://www.unicodemap.org/details/0x2000/index.html
I would like Python to treat it that way so I can use re to remove it from strings.
As an alternative, I would like to know of another way to remove these characters from strings.
I appreciate any help. Thanks!
In a unicode string, you need to specify unicode characters(\uNNNN not \xNNNN). The following works:
>>> import re
>>> my_str=u'\u2000abc'
>>> re.sub(u'[\x00-\x20 \x7F-\xA0 \u1680 \u180E \u2000-\u200A]', ' ', my_str)
' abc'
From the docs (https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html):
Unicode literals can also use the same escape sequences as 8-bit
strings, including \x, but \x only takes two hex digits so it can’t
express an arbitrary code point. Octal escapes can go up to U+01ff,
which is octal 777.
>>> s = u"a\xac\u1234\u20ac\U00008000"
... # ^^^^ two-digit hex escape
... # ^^^^^^ four-digit Unicode escape
... # ^^^^^^^^^^ eight-digit Unicode escape
>>> for c in s: print ord(c),
...
97 172 4660 8364 32768

Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

I need to replace all non-ASCII (\x00-\x7F) characters with a space. I'm surprised that this is not dead-easy in Python, unless I'm missing something. The following function simply removes all non-ASCII characters:
def remove_non_ascii_1(text):
return ''.join(i for i in text if ord(i)<128)
And this one replaces non-ASCII characters with the amount of spaces as per the amount of bytes in the character code point (i.e. the – character is replaced with 3 spaces):
def remove_non_ascii_2(text):
return re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]',' ', text)
How can I replace all non-ASCII characters with a single space?
Of the myriad of similar SO questions, none address character replacement as opposed to stripping, and additionally address all non-ascii characters not a specific character.
Your ''.join() expression is filtering, removing anything non-ASCII; you could use a conditional expression instead:
return ''.join([i if ord(i) < 128 else ' ' for i in text])
This handles characters one by one and would still use one space per character replaced.
Your regular expression should just replace consecutive non-ASCII characters with a space:
re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+',' ', text)
Note the + there.
For you the get the most alike representation of your original string I recommend the unidecode module:
# python 2.x:
from unidecode import unidecode
def remove_non_ascii(text):
return unidecode(unicode(text, encoding = "utf-8"))
Then you can use it in a string:
remove_non_ascii("Ceñía")
Cenia
For character processing, use Unicode strings:
PythonWin 3.3.0 (v3.3.0:bd8afb90ebf2, Sep 29 2012, 10:57:17) [MSC v.1600 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32.
>>> s='ABC马克def'
>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s) # Each char is a Unicode codepoint.
'ABC def'
>>> b = s.encode('utf8')
>>> re.sub(rb'[^\x00-\x7f]',rb' ',b) # Each char is a 3-byte UTF-8 sequence.
b'ABC def'
But note you will still have a problem if your string contains decomposed Unicode characters (separate character and combining accent marks, for example):
>>> s = 'mañana'
>>> len(s)
6
>>> import unicodedata as ud
>>> n=ud.normalize('NFD',s)
>>> n
'mañana'
>>> len(n)
7
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s) # single codepoint
'ma ana'
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',n) # only combining mark replaced
'man ana'
If the replacement character can be '?' instead of a space, then I'd suggest result = text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode():
"""Test the performance of different non-ASCII replacement methods."""
import re
from timeit import timeit
# 10_000 is typical in the project that I'm working on and most of the text
# is going to be non-ASCII.
text = 'Æ' * 10_000
print(timeit(
"""
result = ''.join([c if ord(c) < 128 else '?' for c in text])
""",
number=1000,
globals=globals(),
))
print(timeit(
"""
result = text.encode('ascii', 'replace').decode()
""",
number=1000,
globals=globals(),
))
Results:
0.7208260721400134
0.009975979187503592
What about this one?
def replace_trash(unicode_string):
for i in range(0, len(unicode_string)):
try:
unicode_string[i].encode("ascii")
except:
#means it's non-ASCII
unicode_string=unicode_string[i].replace(" ") #replacing it with a single space
return unicode_string
As a native and efficient approach, you don't need to use ord or any loop over the characters. Just encode with ascii and ignore the errors.
The following will just remove the non-ascii characters:
new_string = old_string.encode('ascii',errors='ignore')
Now if you want to replace the deleted characters just do the following:
final_string = new_string + b' ' * (len(old_string) - len(new_string))
When we use the ascii() it escapes the non-ascii characters and it doesn't change ascii characters correctly. So my main thought is, it doesn't change the ASCII characters, so I am iterating through the string and checking if the character is changed. If it changed then replacing it with the replacer, what you give.
For example: ' '(a single space) or '?' (with a question mark).
def remove(x, replacer):
for i in x:
if f"'{i}'" == ascii(i):
pass
else:
x=x.replace(i,replacer)
return x
remove('hái',' ')
Result: "h i" (with single space between).
Syntax : remove(str,non_ascii_replacer)
str = Here you will give the string you want to work with.
non_ascii_replacer = Here you will give the replacer which you want to replace all the non ASCII characters with.
Pre-processing using Raku (formerly known as Perl_6)
~$ raku -pe 's:g/ <:!ASCII>+ / /;' file
Sample Input:
Peace be upon you
السلام عليكم
שלום עליכם
Paz sobre vosotros
Sample Output:
Peace be upon you
Paz sobre vosotros
Note, you can get extensive information on the matches using the following code:
~$ raku -ne 'say s:g/ <:!ASCII>+ / /.raku;' file
$( )
$(Match.new(:orig("السلام عليكم"), :from(0), :pos(6)), Match.new(:orig("السلام عليكم"), :from(7), :pos(12)))
$(Match.new(:orig("שלום עליכם"), :from(0), :pos(4)), Match.new(:orig("שלום עליכם"), :from(5), :pos(10)))
$( )
$( )
Or more simply, you can just visualize the replacement blank spaces:
~$ raku -ne 'say S:g/ <:!ASCII>+ / /.raku;' file
"Peace be upon you"
" "
" "
"Paz sobre vosotros"
""
https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes#Unicode_properties
https://www.codesections.com/blog/raku-unicode/
https://raku.org
def filterSpecialChars(strInput):
result = []
for character in strInput:
ordVal = ord(character)
if ordVal < 0 or ordVal > 127:
result.append(' ')
else:
result.append(character)
return ''.join(result)
And call it like this:
result = filterSpecialChars('Ceñía mañana')
print(result)
My problem was that my string contained things like Belgià for België and &#x20AC for the € sign. And I didn't want to replace them with spaces. But wth the right symbol itself.
my solution was string.encode('Latin1').decode('utf-8')
Potentially for a different question, but I'm providing my version of #Alvero's answer (using unidecode). I want to do a "regular" strip on my strings, i.e. the beginning and end of my string for whitespace characters, and then replace only other whitespace characters with a "regular" space, i.e.
"Ceñíaㅤmañanaㅤㅤㅤㅤ"
to
"Ceñía mañana"
,
def safely_stripped(s: str):
return ' '.join(
stripped for stripped in
(bit.strip() for bit in
''.join((c if unidecode(c) else ' ') for c in s).strip().split())
if stripped)
We first replace all non-unicode spaces with a regular space (and join it back again),
''.join((c if unidecode(c) else ' ') for c in s)
And then we split that again, with python's normal split, and strip each "bit",
(bit.strip() for bit in s.split())
And lastly join those back again, but only if the string passes an if test,
' '.join(stripped for stripped in s if stripped)
And with that, safely_stripped('ㅤㅤㅤㅤCeñíaㅤmañanaㅤㅤㅤㅤ') correctly returns 'Ceñía mañana'.
To replace all non-ASCII (\x00-\x7F) characters with a space:
''.join(map(lambda x: x if ord(x) in range(0, 128) else ' ', text))
To replace all visible characters, try this:
import string
''.join(map(lambda x: x if x in string.printable and x not in string.whitespace else ' ', text))
This will give the same result:
''.join(map(lambda x: x if ord(x) in range(32, 128) else ' ', text))

String.maketrans for English and Persian numbers

I have a function like this:
persian_numbers = '۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰'
english_numbers = '1234567890'
arabic_numbers = '١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
english_trans = string.maketrans(english_numbers, persian_numbers)
arabic_trans = string.maketrans(arabic_numbers, persian_numbers)
text.translate(english_trans)
text.translate(arabic_trans)
I want it to translate all Arabic and English numbers to Persian. But Python says:
english_translate = string.maketrans(english_numbers, persian_numbers)
ValueError: maketrans arguments must have same length
I tried to encode strings with Unicode utf-8 but I always got some errors! Sometimes the problem is Arabic string instead! Do you know a better solution for this job?
EDIT:
It seems the problem is Unicode characters length in ASCII. An Arabic number like '۱' is two character -- that I find out with ord(). And the length problem starts from here :-(
See unidecode library which converts all strings into UTF8. It is very useful in case of number input in different languages.
In Python 2:
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> a = unidecode(u"۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹")
>>> a
'0123456789'
>>> unidecode(a)
'0123456789'
In Python 3:
>>> from unidecode import unidecode
>>> a = unidecode("۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹")
>>> a
'0123456789'
>>> unidecode(a)
'0123456789'
Unicode objects can interpret these digits (arabic and persian) as actual digits -
no need to translate them by using character substitution.
EDIT -
I came out with a way to make your replacement using Python2 regular expressions:
# coding: utf-8
import re
# Attention: while the characters for the strings bellow are
# dislplayed indentically, inside they are represented
# by distinct unicode codepoints
persian_numbers = u'۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰'
arabic_numbers = u'١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
english_numbers = u'1234567890'
persian_regexp = u"(%s)" % u"|".join(persian_numbers)
arabic_regexp = u"(%s)" % u"|".join(arabic_numbers)
def _sub(match_object, digits):
return english_numbers[digits.find(match_object.group(0))]
def _sub_arabic(match_object):
return _sub(match_object, arabic_numbers)
def _sub_persian(match_object):
return _sub(match_object, persian_numbers)
def replace_arabic(text):
return re.sub(arabic_regexp, _sub_arabic, text)
def replace_persian(text):
return re.sub(arabic_regexp, _sub_persian, text)
Attempt that the "text" parameter must be unicode itself.
(also this code could be shortened
by using lambdas and combining some expressions in a single line, but there is no point in doing so, but for loosing readability)
It should work to you up to here, but please read on the original answer I had posted
-- original answer
So, if you instantiate your variables as unicode (prepending an u to the quote char), they are correctly understood in Python:
>>> persian_numbers = u'۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰'
>>> english_numbers = u'1234567890'
>>> arabic_numbers = u'١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
>>>
>>> print int(persian_numbers)
1234567890
>>> print int(english_numbers)
1234567890
>>> print int(arabic_numbers)
1234567890
>>> persian_numbers.isdigit()
True
>>>
By the way, the "maketrans" method does not exist for unicode objects (in Python2 - see the comments).
It is very important to understand the basics about unicode - for everyone, even people writing English only programs who think they will never deal with any char out of the 26 latin letters. When writing code that will deal with different chars it is vital - the program can't possibly work without you knowing what you are doing except by chance.
A very good article to read is http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html - please read it now.
You can keep in mind, while reading it, that Python allows one to translate unicode characters to a string in any "physical" encoding by using the "encode" method of unicode objects.
>>> arabic_numbers = u'١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
>>> len(arabic_numbers)
10
>>> enc_arabic = arabic_numbers.encode("utf-8")
>>> print enc_arabic
١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠
>>> len(enc_arabic)
20
>>> int(enc_arabic)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '\xd9\xa1\xd9\xa2\xd9\xa3\xd9\xa4\xd9\xa5\xd9\xa6\xd9\xa7\xd9\xa8\xd9\xa9\xd9\xa0'
Thus, the characters loose their sense as "single entities" and as digits when encoding - the encoded object (str type in Python 2.x) is justa strrng of bytes - which nonetheless is needed when sending these characters to any output from the program - be it console, GUI Window, database, html code, etc...
You can use persiantools package:
Examples:
>>> from persiantools import digits
>>> digits.en_to_fa("0987654321")
'۰۹۸۷۶۵۴۳۲۱'
>>> digits.ar_to_fa("٠٩٨٧٦٥٤٣٢١") # or digits.ar_to_fa(u"٠٩٨٧٦٥٤٣٢١")
'۰۹۸۷۶۵۴۳۲۱'
unidecode converts all characters from Persian to English, If you want to change only numbers follow bellow:
In python3 you can use this code to convert any Persian|Arabic number to English number while keeping other characters unchanged:
intab='۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
outtab='12345678901234567890'
translation_table = str.maketrans(intab, outtab)
output_text = input_text.translate(translation_table)
Use Unicode Strings:
persian_numbers = u'۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰'
english_numbers = u'1234567890'
arabic_numbers = u'١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠'
And make sure the encoding of your Python file is correct.
With this you can easily do that:
def p2e(persiannumber):
number={
'0':'۰',
'1':'۱',
'2':'۲',
'3':'۳',
'4':'۴',
'5':'۵',
'6':'۶',
'7':'۷',
'8':'۸',
'9':'۹',
}
for i,j in number.items():
persiannumber=persiannumber.replace(j,i)
return persiannumber
here is usage:
print(p2e('۳۱۹۶'))
#returns 3196
In Python 3 easiest way is:
str(int('۱۲۳'))
#123
but if number starts with 0 it have an issue.
so we can use zip() function:
for i, j in zip('1234567890', '۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰'):
number.replace(i, j)
def persian_number(persiannumber):
number={
'0':'۰',
'1':'۱',
'2':'۲',
'3':'۳',
'4':'۴',
'5':'۵',
'6':'۶',
'7':'۷',
'8':'۸',
'9':'۹',
}
for i,j in number.items():
persiannumber=time2str.replace(i,j)
return time2str
persiannumber must be a string

How do I lowercase a string in Python?

Is there a way to convert a string to lowercase?
"Kilometers" → "kilometers"
Use str.lower():
"Kilometer".lower()
The canonical Pythonic way of doing this is
>>> 'Kilometers'.lower()
'kilometers'
However, if the purpose is to do case insensitive matching, you should use case-folding:
>>> 'Kilometers'.casefold()
'kilometers'
Here's why:
>>> "Maße".casefold()
'masse'
>>> "Maße".lower()
'maße'
>>> "MASSE" == "Maße"
False
>>> "MASSE".lower() == "Maße".lower()
False
>>> "MASSE".casefold() == "Maße".casefold()
True
This is a str method in Python 3, but in Python 2, you'll want to look at the PyICU or py2casefold - several answers address this here.
Unicode Python 3
Python 3 handles plain string literals as unicode:
>>> string = 'Километр'
>>> string
'Километр'
>>> string.lower()
'километр'
Python 2, plain string literals are bytes
In Python 2, the below, pasted into a shell, encodes the literal as a string of bytes, using utf-8.
And lower doesn't map any changes that bytes would be aware of, so we get the same string.
>>> string = 'Километр'
>>> string
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> string.lower()
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> print string.lower()
Километр
In scripts, Python will object to non-ascii (as of Python 2.5, and warning in Python 2.4) bytes being in a string with no encoding given, since the intended coding would be ambiguous. For more on that, see the Unicode how-to in the docs and PEP 263
Use Unicode literals, not str literals
So we need a unicode string to handle this conversion, accomplished easily with a unicode string literal, which disambiguates with a u prefix (and note the u prefix also works in Python 3):
>>> unicode_literal = u'Километр'
>>> print(unicode_literal.lower())
километр
Note that the bytes are completely different from the str bytes - the escape character is '\u' followed by the 2-byte width, or 16 bit representation of these unicode letters:
>>> unicode_literal
u'\u041a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> unicode_literal.lower()
u'\u043a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
Now if we only have it in the form of a str, we need to convert it to unicode. Python's Unicode type is a universal encoding format that has many advantages relative to most other encodings. We can either use the unicode constructor or str.decode method with the codec to convert the str to unicode:
>>> unicode_from_string = unicode(string, 'utf-8') # "encoding" unicode from string
>>> print(unicode_from_string.lower())
километр
>>> string_to_unicode = string.decode('utf-8')
>>> print(string_to_unicode.lower())
километр
>>> unicode_from_string == string_to_unicode == unicode_literal
True
Both methods convert to the unicode type - and same as the unicode_literal.
Best Practice, use Unicode
It is recommended that you always work with text in Unicode.
Software should only work with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output.
Can encode back when necessary
However, to get the lowercase back in type str, encode the python string to utf-8 again:
>>> print string
Километр
>>> string
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> string.decode('utf-8')
u'\u041a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> string.decode('utf-8').lower()
u'\u043a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> string.decode('utf-8').lower().encode('utf-8')
'\xd0\xba\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> print string.decode('utf-8').lower().encode('utf-8')
километр
So in Python 2, Unicode can encode into Python strings, and Python strings can decode into the Unicode type.
With Python 2, this doesn't work for non-English words in UTF-8. In this case decode('utf-8') can help:
>>> s='Километр'
>>> print s.lower()
Километр
>>> print s.decode('utf-8').lower()
километр
Also, you can overwrite some variables:
s = input('UPPER CASE')
lower = s.lower()
If you use like this:
s = "Kilometer"
print(s.lower()) - kilometer
print(s) - Kilometer
It will work just when called.
Don't try this, totally un-recommend, don't do this:
import string
s='ABCD'
print(''.join([string.ascii_lowercase[string.ascii_uppercase.index(i)] for i in s]))
Output:
abcd
Since no one wrote it yet you can use swapcase (so uppercase letters will become lowercase, and vice versa) (and this one you should use in cases where i just mentioned (convert upper to lower, lower to upper)):
s='ABCD'
print(s.swapcase())
Output:
abcd
I would like to provide the summary of all possible methods
.lower() method.
str.lower()
combination of str.translate() and str.maketrans()
.lower() method
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = original_string.lower()
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"
str.lower()
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = str.lower(original_string)
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"
combination of str.translate() and str.maketrans()
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = original_string.translate(str.maketrans(string.ascii_uppercase, string.ascii_lowercase))
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"
lowercasing
This method not only converts all uppercase letters of the Latin alphabet into lowercase ones, but also shows how such logic is implemented. You can test this code in any online Python sandbox.
def turnIntoLowercase(string):
lowercaseCharacters = ''
abc = ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k','l','m',
'n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z',
'A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I','J','K','L','M',
'N','O','P','Q','R','S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z']
for character in string:
if character not in abc:
lowercaseCharacters += character
elif abc.index(character) <= 25:
lowercaseCharacters += character
else:
lowercaseCharacters += abc[abc.index(character) - 26]
return lowercaseCharacters
string = str(input("Enter your string, please: " ))
print(turnIntoLowercase(string = string))
Performance check
Now, let's enter the following string (and press Enter) to make sure everything works as intended:
# Enter your string, please:
"PYTHON 3.11.2, 15TH FeB 2023"
Result:
"python 3.11.2, 15th feb 2023"
If you want to convert a list of strings to lowercase, you can map str.lower:
list_of_strings = ['CamelCase', 'in', 'Python']
list(map(str.lower, list_of_strings)) # ['camelcase', 'in', 'python']

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