Getting rid of certain characters in a string in python - python

I have characters in the middle of a string that I want to get rid of. These characters are =, p,, and H. Since they are not the leftmost and the rightmost characters in the string, I cannot use strip(). Is there a function that gets rid of a certain character in any location in a string?

The usual tool for this job is str.translate
https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#str.translate
>>> 'hello=potato'.translate(None, '=p')
'hellootato'

Check the .replace() function:
> 'aaba'.replace('a','').replace('b','')
< ''

My usual tool for this is the regular expression.
>>> import re
>>> invalidCharacters = r'[=p H]'
>>> mystring = re.sub(invalidCharacters, '', ' poH==hHoPPp p')
'ohoPP'
If you need to constrain the number (i.e., the count) of characters you remove, see the count argument.

Related

Remove Characters From A String Until A Specific Format is Reached

So I have the following strings and I have been trying to figure out how to manipulate them in such a way that I get a specific format.
string1-itd_jan2021-internal
string2itd_mar2021-space
string3itd_feb2021-internal
string4-itd_mar2021-moon
string5itd_jun2021-internal
string6-itd_feb2021-apollo
I want to be able to get rid of any of the last string so I am just left with the month and year, like below:
string1-itd_jan2021
string2itd_mar2021
string3itd_feb2021
string4-itd_mar2021
string5itd_jun2021
string6-itd_feb2021
I thought about using string.split on the - but then realized that for some strings this wouldn't work. I also thought about getting rid of a set amount of characters by putting it into a list and slicing but the end is varying characters length?
Is there anything I can do it with regex or any other python module?
Use str.rsplit with the appropriate maxsplit parameter:
s = s.rsplit("-", 1)[0]
You could also use str.split (even though this is clearly the worse choice):
s = "-".join(s.split("-")[:-1])
Or using regular expressions:
s = re.sub(r'-[^-]*$', '', s)
# "-[^-]*" a "-" followed by any number of non-"-"
With a regex:
import re
re.sub(r'([0-9]{4}).*$', r'\1', s)
Use re.sub like so:
import re
lines = '''string1-itd_jan2021-internal
string2itd_mar2021-space
string3itd_feb2021-internal
string4-itd_mar2021-moon
string5itd_jun2021-internal
string6-itd_feb2021-apollo'''
for old in lines.split('\n'):
new = re.sub(r'[-][^-]+$', '', old)
print('\t'.join([old, new]))
Prints:
string1-itd_jan2021-internal string1-itd_jan2021
string2itd_mar2021-space string2itd_mar2021
string3itd_feb2021-internal string3itd_feb2021
string4-itd_mar2021-moon string4-itd_mar2021
string5itd_jun2021-internal string5itd_jun2021
string6-itd_feb2021-apollo string6-itd_feb2021
Explanation:
r'[-][^-]+$' : Literal dash (-), followed by any character other than a dash ([^-]) repeated 1 or more times, followed by the end of the string ($).

Regex to get all occurrences of a pattern followed by a value in a comma separate string

This is in python
Input string:
Str = 'Y=DAT,X=ZANG,FU=_COG-GAB-CANE-,FU=FARE,T=TART,RO=TOP,FU=#-_MAP.com-,Z=TRY'
Expected output
'FU=_COG-GAB-CANE_,FU=FARE,FU=#-_MAP.com_'
here 'FU=' is the occurence we are looking for and the value which follows FU=
return all occurrences of FU=(with the associated value for FU=) in a comma-separated string, they can occur anywhere within the string and special characters are allowed.
Here is one approach.
>>> import re
>>> str_ = 'Y=DAT,X=ZANG,FU=FAT,T=TART,FU=GEM,RO=TOP,FU=MAP,Z=TRY'
>>> re.findall.__doc__[:58]
'Return a list of all non-overlapping matches in the string'
>>> re.findall(r'FU=\w+', str_)
['FU=FAT', 'FU=GEM', 'FU=MAP']
>>> ','.join(re.findall(r'FU=\w+', str_))
'FU=FAT,FU=GEM,FU=MAP'
Got it working
Python Code
import re
str_ = 'Y=DAT,X=ZANG,FU=_COG-GAB-CANE-,FU=FARE,T=TART,RO=TOP,FU=#-_MAP.com-,Z=TRY'
str2='FU='+',FU='.join(re.findall(r'FU=(.*?),', str_))
print(str2)
Gives the desired output:
'FU=_COG-GAB-CANE-,FU=FARE,FU=#-_MAP.com-'
Successfully gives me all the occurrences of FU= followed by values, irrespective of order and number of special characters.
Although a bit unclean way as I am manually adding FU= for the first occurrence.
Please suggest if there is a cleaner way of doing it ? , but yes it gets the work done.

Remove special characters (in list) in string

I have a bunch of special characters which are in a list like:
special=[r'''\\''', r'''+''', r'''-''', r'''&''', r'''|''', r'''!''', r'''(''', r''')''', r'''{''', r'''}''',\
r'''[''', r''']''', r'''^''', r'''~''', r'''*''', r'''?''', r''':''', r'''"''', r''';''', r''' ''']
And I have a string:
stringer="Müller my [ string ! is cool^&"
How do I make this replacement? I am expecting:
stringer = "Müller my string is cool"
Also, is there some builtin to replace these ‘special’ chars in Python?
This can be solved with a simple generator expression:
>>> ''.join(ch for ch in stringer if ch not in special)
'M\xc3\xbcllermystringiscool'
Note that this also removes the spaces, since they're in your special list (the last element). If you don't want them removed, either don't include the space in special or do modify the if check accordingly.
If you remove the space from your specials you can do it using re.sub() but note that first you need to escape the special regex characters.
In [58]: special=[r'''\\''', r'''+''', r'''-''', r'''&''', r'''|''', r'''!''', r'''(''', r''')''', r'''{''', r'''}''',\
r'''[''', r''']''', r'''^''', r'''~''', r'''*''', r'''?''', r''':''', r'''"''', r''';''']
In [59]: print re.sub(r"[{}]".format(re.escape(''.join(special))), '', stringer, re.U)
Müller my string is cool

Strip 2m characters from string in Python

I'm trying to remove the "m2" characters from a string using python. This is the code i'm using right now. Unfortunately it appears to do nothing to the string.
Typically the string i would like to strip looks as follow; 502m2, 3m2....
if "m2" in messageContent:
messageContent = messageContent.translate(None, 'm2')
str.translate() is not the correct tool here; you are removing all m and all 2 characters regardless of their context.
If you need to remove the literal text 'm2', just use str.replace():
messageContent = messageContent.replace('m2', '')
You don't even need to test first; str.replace() will return the string unchanged if there are no instances of the literal text present:
>>> '502m2, 3m2'.replace('m2', '')
'502, 3'
>>> 'The quick brown fox'.replace('m2', '')
'The quick brown fox'
Just use str.replace
Return a copy of the string with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new. If the optional argument count is given, only the first count occurrences are replaced.
s = "502m2, 3m2"
print s.replace("m2","")
502, 3

Understanding string method strip

After initializing a variable x with the content shown in below, I applied strip with a parameter. The result of strip is unexpected. As I'm trying to strip "ios_static_analyzer/", "rity/ios_static_analyzer/" is getting striped.
Kindly help me know why is it so.
>>> print x
/Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_analyzer/
>>> print x.strip()
/Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_analyzer/
>>> print x.strip('/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_analyzer
>>> print x.strip('ios_static_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/secu
>>> print x.strip('analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_
>>> print x.strip('_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static
>>> print x.strip('static_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/io
>>> print x.strip('_static_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/io
>>> print x.strip('s_static_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/io
>>> print x.strip('os_static_analyzer/')
Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/secu
Quoting from str.strip docs
Return a copy of the string with the leading and trailing characters
removed. The chars argument is a string specifying the set of
characters to be removed. If omitted or None, the chars argument
defaults to removing whitespace. The chars argument is not a prefix or
suffix; rather, all combinations of its values are stripped:
So, it removes all the characters in the parameter, from both the sides of the string.
For example,
my_str = "abcd"
print my_str.strip("da") # bc
Note: You can think of it like this, it stops removing the characters from the string when it finds a character which is not found in the input parameter string.
To actually, remove the particular string, you should use str.replace
x = "/Users/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_analyzer/"
print x.replace('analyzer/', '')
# /Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/ios_static_
But replace will remove the matches everywhere,
x = "abcd1abcd2abcd"
print x.replace('abcd', '') # 12
But if you want to remove words only at the beginning and ending of the string, you can use RegEx, like this
import re
pattern = re.compile("^{0}|{0}$".format("abcd"))
x = "abcd1abcd2abcd"
print pattern.sub("", x) # 1abcd2
What you need, I think, is replace:
>>> x.replace('ios_static_analyzer/','')
'/Users/msecurity/Desktop/testspace/Hy5_Workspace/security/'
string.replace(s, old, new[, maxreplace])
Return a copy of string s with all occurrences of substring old replaced by new.
So you can replace your string with nothing and get the desired output.
Python x.strip(s) remove from the begginning or the end of the string x any character appearing in s ! So s is just a set of characters, not a string being matched for substring.
string.strip removes a set of characters given as an argument. The chars argument is not a prefix or suffix; rather, all combinations of its values are stripped.
strip does not remove the string given as argument from the object; it removes the characters in the argument.
In this case, strip sees the string s_static_analyzer/ as an iterable of characters that needs to be stripped.

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