I'm trying to remove specific characters from a string using Python. This is the code I'm using right now. Unfortunately it appears to do nothing to the string.
for char in line:
if char in " ?.!/;:":
line.replace(char,'')
How do I do this properly?
Strings in Python are immutable (can't be changed). Because of this, the effect of line.replace(...) is just to create a new string, rather than changing the old one. You need to rebind (assign) it to line in order to have that variable take the new value, with those characters removed.
Also, the way you are doing it is going to be kind of slow, relatively. It's also likely to be a bit confusing to experienced pythonators, who will see a doubly-nested structure and think for a moment that something more complicated is going on.
Starting in Python 2.6 and newer Python 2.x versions *, you can instead use str.translate, (see Python 3 answer below):
line = line.translate(None, '!##$')
or regular expression replacement with re.sub
import re
line = re.sub('[!##$]', '', line)
The characters enclosed in brackets constitute a character class. Any characters in line which are in that class are replaced with the second parameter to sub: an empty string.
Python 3 answer
In Python 3, strings are Unicode. You'll have to translate a little differently. kevpie mentions this in a comment on one of the answers, and it's noted in the documentation for str.translate.
When calling the translate method of a Unicode string, you cannot pass the second parameter that we used above. You also can't pass None as the first parameter. Instead, you pass a translation table (usually a dictionary) as the only parameter. This table maps the ordinal values of characters (i.e. the result of calling ord on them) to the ordinal values of the characters which should replace them, or—usefully to us—None to indicate that they should be deleted.
So to do the above dance with a Unicode string you would call something like
translation_table = dict.fromkeys(map(ord, '!##$'), None)
unicode_line = unicode_line.translate(translation_table)
Here dict.fromkeys and map are used to succinctly generate a dictionary containing
{ord('!'): None, ord('#'): None, ...}
Even simpler, as another answer puts it, create the translation table in place:
unicode_line = unicode_line.translate({ord(c): None for c in '!##$'})
Or, as brought up by Joseph Lee, create the same translation table with str.maketrans:
unicode_line = unicode_line.translate(str.maketrans('', '', '!##$'))
* for compatibility with earlier Pythons, you can create a "null" translation table to pass in place of None:
import string
line = line.translate(string.maketrans('', ''), '!##$')
Here string.maketrans is used to create a translation table, which is just a string containing the characters with ordinal values 0 to 255.
Am I missing the point here, or is it just the following:
string = "ab1cd1ef"
string = string.replace("1", "")
print(string)
# result: "abcdef"
Put it in a loop:
a = "a!b#c#d$"
b = "!##$"
for char in b:
a = a.replace(char, "")
print(a)
# result: "abcd"
>>> line = "abc##!?efg12;:?"
>>> ''.join( c for c in line if c not in '?:!/;' )
'abc##efg12'
With re.sub regular expression
Since Python 3.5, substitution using regular expressions re.sub became available:
import re
re.sub('\ |\?|\.|\!|\/|\;|\:', '', line)
Example
import re
line = 'Q: Do I write ;/.??? No!!!'
re.sub('\ |\?|\.|\!|\/|\;|\:', '', line)
'QDoIwriteNo'
Explanation
In regular expressions (regex), | is a logical OR and \ escapes spaces and special characters that might be actual regex commands. Whereas sub stands for substitution, in this case with the empty string ''.
The asker almost had it. Like most things in Python, the answer is simpler than you think.
>>> line = "H E?.LL!/;O:: "
>>> for char in ' ?.!/;:':
... line = line.replace(char,'')
...
>>> print line
HELLO
You don't have to do the nested if/for loop thing, but you DO need to check each character individually.
For the inverse requirement of only allowing certain characters in a string, you can use regular expressions with a set complement operator [^ABCabc]. For example, to remove everything except ascii letters, digits, and the hyphen:
>>> import string
>>> import re
>>>
>>> phrase = ' There were "nine" (9) chick-peas in my pocket!!! '
>>> allow = string.letters + string.digits + '-'
>>> re.sub('[^%s]' % allow, '', phrase)
'Therewerenine9chick-peasinmypocket'
From the python regular expression documentation:
Characters that are not within a range can be matched by complementing
the set. If the first character of the set is '^', all the characters
that are not in the set will be matched. For example, [^5] will match
any character except '5', and [^^] will match any character except
'^'. ^ has no special meaning if it’s not the first character in the
set.
line = line.translate(None, " ?.!/;:")
>>> s = 'a1b2c3'
>>> ''.join(c for c in s if c not in '123')
'abc'
Strings are immutable in Python. The replace method returns a new string after the replacement. Try:
for char in line:
if char in " ?.!/;:":
line = line.replace(char,'')
This is identical to your original code, with the addition of an assignment to line inside the loop.
Note that the string replace() method replaces all of the occurrences of the character in the string, so you can do better by using replace() for each character you want to remove, instead of looping over each character in your string.
I was surprised that no one had yet recommended using the builtin filter function.
import operator
import string # only for the example you could use a custom string
s = "1212edjaq"
Say we want to filter out everything that isn't a number. Using the filter builtin method "...is equivalent to the generator expression (item for item in iterable if function(item))" [Python 3 Builtins: Filter]
sList = list(s)
intsList = list(string.digits)
obj = filter(lambda x: operator.contains(intsList, x), sList)))
In Python 3 this returns
>> <filter object # hex>
To get a printed string,
nums = "".join(list(obj))
print(nums)
>> "1212"
I am not sure how filter ranks in terms of efficiency but it is a good thing to know how to use when doing list comprehensions and such.
UPDATE
Logically, since filter works you could also use list comprehension and from what I have read it is supposed to be more efficient because lambdas are the wall street hedge fund managers of the programming function world. Another plus is that it is a one-liner that doesnt require any imports. For example, using the same string 's' defined above,
num = "".join([i for i in s if i.isdigit()])
That's it. The return will be a string of all the characters that are digits in the original string.
If you have a specific list of acceptable/unacceptable characters you need only adjust the 'if' part of the list comprehension.
target_chars = "".join([i for i in s if i in some_list])
or alternatively,
target_chars = "".join([i for i in s if i not in some_list])
Using filter, you'd just need one line
line = filter(lambda char: char not in " ?.!/;:", line)
This treats the string as an iterable and checks every character if the lambda returns True:
>>> help(filter)
Help on built-in function filter in module __builtin__:
filter(...)
filter(function or None, sequence) -> list, tuple, or string
Return those items of sequence for which function(item) is true. If
function is None, return the items that are true. If sequence is a tuple
or string, return the same type, else return a list.
Try this one:
def rm_char(original_str, need2rm):
''' Remove charecters in "need2rm" from "original_str" '''
return original_str.translate(str.maketrans('','',need2rm))
This method works well in Python 3
Here's some possible ways to achieve this task:
def attempt1(string):
return "".join([v for v in string if v not in ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u")])
def attempt2(string):
for v in ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u"):
string = string.replace(v, "")
return string
def attempt3(string):
import re
for v in ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u"):
string = re.sub(v, "", string)
return string
def attempt4(string):
return string.replace("a", "").replace("e", "").replace("i", "").replace("o", "").replace("u", "")
for attempt in [attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, attempt4]:
print(attempt("murcielago"))
PS: Instead using " ?.!/;:" the examples use the vowels... and yeah, "murcielago" is the Spanish word to say bat... funny word as it contains all the vowels :)
PS2: If you're interested on performance you could measure these attempts with a simple code like:
import timeit
K = 1000000
for i in range(1,5):
t = timeit.Timer(
f"attempt{i}('murcielago')",
setup=f"from __main__ import attempt{i}"
).repeat(1, K)
print(f"attempt{i}",min(t))
In my box you'd get:
attempt1 2.2334518376057244
attempt2 1.8806643818474513
attempt3 7.214925774955572
attempt4 1.7271184513757465
So it seems attempt4 is the fastest one for this particular input.
Here's my Python 2/3 compatible version. Since the translate api has changed.
def remove(str_, chars):
"""Removes each char in `chars` from `str_`.
Args:
str_: String to remove characters from
chars: String of to-be removed characters
Returns:
A copy of str_ with `chars` removed
Example:
remove("What?!?: darn;", " ?.!:;") => 'Whatdarn'
"""
try:
# Python2.x
return str_.translate(None, chars)
except TypeError:
# Python 3.x
table = {ord(char): None for char in chars}
return str_.translate(table)
#!/usr/bin/python
import re
strs = "how^ much for{} the maple syrup? $20.99? That's[] ricidulous!!!"
print strs
nstr = re.sub(r'[?|$|.|!|a|b]',r' ',strs)#i have taken special character to remove but any #character can be added here
print nstr
nestr = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]',r'',nstr)#for removing special character
print nestr
You can also use a function in order to substitute different kind of regular expression or other pattern with the use of a list. With that, you can mixed regular expression, character class, and really basic text pattern. It's really useful when you need to substitute a lot of elements like HTML ones.
*NB: works with Python 3.x
import re # Regular expression library
def string_cleanup(x, notwanted):
for item in notwanted:
x = re.sub(item, '', x)
return x
line = "<title>My example: <strong>A text %very% $clean!!</strong></title>"
print("Uncleaned: ", line)
# Get rid of html elements
html_elements = ["<title>", "</title>", "<strong>", "</strong>"]
line = string_cleanup(line, html_elements)
print("1st clean: ", line)
# Get rid of special characters
special_chars = ["[!##$]", "%"]
line = string_cleanup(line, special_chars)
print("2nd clean: ", line)
In the function string_cleanup, it takes your string x and your list notwanted as arguments. For each item in that list of elements or pattern, if a substitute is needed it will be done.
The output:
Uncleaned: <title>My example: <strong>A text %very% $clean!!</strong></title>
1st clean: My example: A text %very% $clean!!
2nd clean: My example: A text very clean
My method I'd use probably wouldn't work as efficiently, but it is massively simple. I can remove multiple characters at different positions all at once, using slicing and formatting.
Here's an example:
words = "things"
removed = "%s%s" % (words[:3], words[-1:])
This will result in 'removed' holding the word 'this'.
Formatting can be very helpful for printing variables midway through a print string. It can insert any data type using a % followed by the variable's data type; all data types can use %s, and floats (aka decimals) and integers can use %d.
Slicing can be used for intricate control over strings. When I put words[:3], it allows me to select all the characters in the string from the beginning (the colon is before the number, this will mean 'from the beginning to') to the 4th character (it includes the 4th character). The reason 3 equals till the 4th position is because Python starts at 0. Then, when I put word[-1:], it means the 2nd last character to the end (the colon is behind the number). Putting -1 will make Python count from the last character, rather than the first. Again, Python will start at 0. So, word[-1:] basically means 'from the second last character to the end of the string.
So, by cutting off the characters before the character I want to remove and the characters after and sandwiching them together, I can remove the unwanted character. Think of it like a sausage. In the middle it's dirty, so I want to get rid of it. I simply cut off the two ends I want then put them together without the unwanted part in the middle.
If I want to remove multiple consecutive characters, I simply shift the numbers around in the [] (slicing part). Or if I want to remove multiple characters from different positions, I can simply sandwich together multiple slices at once.
Examples:
words = "control"
removed = "%s%s" % (words[:2], words[-2:])
removed equals 'cool'.
words = "impacts"
removed = "%s%s%s" % (words[1], words[3:5], words[-1])
removed equals 'macs'.
In this case, [3:5] means character at position 3 through character at position 5 (excluding the character at the final position).
Remember, Python starts counting at 0, so you will need to as well.
In Python 3.5
e.g.,
os.rename(file_name, file_name.translate({ord(c): None for c in '0123456789'}))
To remove all the number from the string
How about this:
def text_cleanup(text):
new = ""
for i in text:
if i not in " ?.!/;:":
new += i
return new
Below one.. with out using regular expression concept..
ipstring ="text with symbols!##$^&*( ends here"
opstring=''
for i in ipstring:
if i.isalnum()==1 or i==' ':
opstring+=i
pass
print opstring
Recursive split:
s=string ; chars=chars to remove
def strip(s,chars):
if len(s)==1:
return "" if s in chars else s
return strip(s[0:int(len(s)/2)],chars) + strip(s[int(len(s)/2):len(s)],chars)
example:
print(strip("Hello!","lo")) #He!
You could use the re module's regular expression replacement. Using the ^ expression allows you to pick exactly what you want from your string.
import re
text = "This is absurd!"
text = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]","",text) # Keeps only Alphabets
print(text)
Output to this would be "Thisisabsurd". Only things specified after the ^ symbol will appear.
# for each file on a directory, rename filename
file_list = os.listdir (r"D:\Dev\Python")
for file_name in file_list:
os.rename(file_name, re.sub(r'\d+','',file_name))
Even the below approach works
line = "a,b,c,d,e"
alpha = list(line)
while ',' in alpha:
alpha.remove(',')
finalString = ''.join(alpha)
print(finalString)
output: abcde
The string method replace does not modify the original string. It leaves the original alone and returns a modified copy.
What you want is something like: line = line.replace(char,'')
def replace_all(line, )for char in line:
if char in " ?.!/;:":
line = line.replace(char,'')
return line
However, creating a new string each and every time that a character is removed is very inefficient. I recommend the following instead:
def replace_all(line, baddies, *):
"""
The following is documentation on how to use the class,
without reference to the implementation details:
For implementation notes, please see comments begining with `#`
in the source file.
[*crickets chirp*]
"""
is_bad = lambda ch, baddies=baddies: return ch in baddies
filter_baddies = lambda ch, *, is_bad=is_bad: "" if is_bad(ch) else ch
mahp = replace_all.map(filter_baddies, line)
return replace_all.join('', join(mahp))
# -------------------------------------------------
# WHY `baddies=baddies`?!?
# `is_bad=is_bad`
# -------------------------------------------------
# Default arguments to a lambda function are evaluated
# at the same time as when a lambda function is
# **defined**.
#
# global variables of a lambda function
# are evaluated when the lambda function is
# **called**
#
# The following prints "as yellow as snow"
#
# fleece_color = "white"
# little_lamb = lambda end: return "as " + fleece_color + end
#
# # sometime later...
#
# fleece_color = "yellow"
# print(little_lamb(" as snow"))
# --------------------------------------------------
replace_all.map = map
replace_all.join = str.join
If you want your string to be just allowed characters by using ASCII codes, you can use this piece of code:
for char in s:
if ord(char) < 96 or ord(char) > 123:
s = s.replace(char, "")
It will remove all the characters beyond a....z even upper cases.
I have the following code:
import string
def translate_non_alphanumerics(to_translate, translate_to='_'):
not_letters_or_digits = u'!"#%\'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~'
translate_table = string.maketrans(not_letters_or_digits,
translate_to
*len(not_letters_or_digits))
return to_translate.translate(translate_table)
Which works great for non-unicode strings:
>>> translate_non_alphanumerics('<foo>!')
'_foo__'
But fails for unicode strings:
>>> translate_non_alphanumerics(u'<foo>!')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 5, in translate_non_alphanumerics
TypeError: character mapping must return integer, None or unicode
I can't make any sense of the paragraph on "Unicode objects" in the Python 2.6.2 docs for the str.translate() method.
How do I make this work for Unicode strings?
The Unicode version of translate requires a mapping from Unicode ordinals (which you can retrieve for a single character with ord) to Unicode ordinals. If you want to delete characters, you map to None.
I changed your function to build a dict mapping the ordinal of every character to the ordinal of what you want to translate to:
def translate_non_alphanumerics(to_translate, translate_to=u'_'):
not_letters_or_digits = u'!"#%\'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~'
translate_table = dict((ord(char), translate_to) for char in not_letters_or_digits)
return to_translate.translate(translate_table)
>>> translate_non_alphanumerics(u'<foo>!')
u'_foo__'
edit: It turns out that the translation mapping must map from the Unicode ordinal (via ord) to either another Unicode ordinal, a Unicode string, or None (to delete). I have thus changed the default value for translate_to to be a Unicode literal. For example:
>>> translate_non_alphanumerics(u'<foo>!', u'bad')
u'badfoobadbad'
In this version you can relatively make one's letters to other
def trans(to_translate):
tabin = u'привет'
tabout = u'тевирп'
tabin = [ord(char) for char in tabin]
translate_table = dict(zip(tabin, tabout))
return to_translate.translate(translate_table)
I came up with the following combination of my original function and Mike's version that works with Unicode and ASCII strings:
def translate_non_alphanumerics(to_translate, translate_to=u'_'):
not_letters_or_digits = u'!"#%\'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~'
if isinstance(to_translate, unicode):
translate_table = dict((ord(char), unicode(translate_to))
for char in not_letters_or_digits)
else:
assert isinstance(to_translate, str)
translate_table = string.maketrans(not_letters_or_digits,
translate_to
*len(not_letters_or_digits))
return to_translate.translate(translate_table)
Update: "coerced" translate_to to unicode for the unicode translate_table. Thanks Mike.
For a simple hack that will work on both str and unicode objects,
convert the translation table to unicode before running translate():
import string
def translate_non_alphanumerics(to_translate, translate_to='_'):
not_letters_or_digits = u'!"#%\'()*+,-./:;<=>?#[\]^_`{|}~'
translate_table = string.maketrans(not_letters_or_digits,
translate_to
*len(not_letters_or_digits))
translate_table = translate_table.decode("latin-1")
return to_translate.translate(translate_table)
The catch here is that it will implicitly convert all str objects to unicode,
throwing errors if to_translate contains non-ascii characters.
I had a unique problem compared to the others here. First I knew that my string possibly had unicode chars in it. (Thanks to Email on Mac...) But one of the common chars was the emdash AKA u"\u2014" character which needed to be converted (back) to two dashes AKA "--". The other chars that might be found are single char translations so they are similar to the other solutions.
First I created a dict for the emdash. For these I use a simple string.replace() to convert them. Other similar chars could be handled here too.
uTranslateDict = {
u"\u2014": "--", # Emdash
}
Then I created a tuple for the 1:1 translations. These go through the string.translate() builtin.
uTranslateTuple = [(u"\u2010", "-"), # Hyphen
(u"\u2013", "-"), # Endash
(u"\u2018", "'"), # Left single quote => single quote
(u"\u2019", "'"), # Right single quote => single quote
(u"\u201a", "'"), # Single Low-9 quote => single quote
(u"\u201b", "'"), # Single High-Reversed-9 quote => single quote
(u"\u201c", '"'), # Left double quote => double quote
(u"\u201d", '"'), # Right double quote => double quote
(u"\u201e", '"'), # Double Low-9 quote => double quote
(u"\u201f", '"'), # Double High-Reversed-9 quote => double quote
(u"\u2022", "*"), # Bullet
]
Then the function.
def uTranslate(uToTranslate):
uTranslateTable = dict((ord(From), unicode(To)) for From, To in uTranslateTuple)
for c in uTranslateDict.keys():
uIntermediateStr = uToTranslate.decode("utf-8").replace(c, uTranslateDict[c])
return uIntermediateStr.translate(uTranslateTable)
Since I know the format of the input string I didn't have to worry about two types of input strings.
Instead of having to specify all the characters that need to be replaced, you could also view it the other way around and, instead, specify only the valid characters, like so:
import re
def replace_non_alphanumerics(source, replacement_character='_'):
result = re.sub("[^_a-zA-Z0-9]", replacement_character, source)
return result
This works with unicode as well as regular strings, and preserves the type (if both the replacement_character and the source are of the same type, obviously).
I found that where in python 2.7, with type str, you would write
import string
table = string.maketrans("123", "abc")
print "135".translate(table)
whereas with type unicode you would say
table = {ord(s): unicode(d) for s, d in zip("123", "abc")}
print u"135".translate(table)
In python 3.6 you would write
table = {ord(s): d for s, d in zip("123", "abc")}
print("135".translate(table))
maybe this is helpful.
I use to run
$s =~ s/[^[:print:]]//g;
on Perl to get rid of non printable characters.
In Python there's no POSIX regex classes, and I can't write [:print:] having it mean what I want. I know of no way in Python to detect if a character is printable or not.
What would you do?
EDIT: It has to support Unicode characters as well. The string.printable way will happily strip them out of the output.
curses.ascii.isprint will return false for any unicode character.
Iterating over strings is unfortunately rather slow in Python. Regular expressions are over an order of magnitude faster for this kind of thing. You just have to build the character class yourself. The unicodedata module is quite helpful for this, especially the unicodedata.category() function. See Unicode Character Database for descriptions of the categories.
import unicodedata, re, itertools, sys
all_chars = (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(chr, itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20), range(0x7f,0xa0))))
control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))
def remove_control_chars(s):
return control_char_re.sub('', s)
For Python2
import unicodedata, re, sys
all_chars = (unichr(i) for i in xrange(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(unichr, range(0x00,0x20) + range(0x7f,0xa0)))
control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))
def remove_control_chars(s):
return control_char_re.sub('', s)
For some use-cases, additional categories (e.g. all from the control group might be preferable, although this might slow down the processing time and increase memory usage significantly. Number of characters per category:
Cc (control): 65
Cf (format): 161
Cs (surrogate): 2048
Co (private-use): 137468
Cn (unassigned): 836601
Edit Adding suggestions from the comments.
As far as I know, the most pythonic/efficient method would be:
import string
filtered_string = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, myStr)
You could try setting up a filter using the unicodedata.category() function:
import unicodedata
printable = {'Lu', 'Ll'}
def filter_non_printable(str):
return ''.join(c for c in str if unicodedata.category(c) in printable)
See Table 4-9 on page 175 in the Unicode database character properties for the available categories
The following will work with Unicode input and is rather fast...
import sys
# build a table mapping all non-printable characters to None
NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE = {
i: None for i in range(0, sys.maxunicode + 1) if not chr(i).isprintable()
}
def make_printable(s):
"""Replace non-printable characters in a string."""
# the translate method on str removes characters
# that map to None from the string
return s.translate(NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE)
assert make_printable('Café') == 'Café'
assert make_printable('\x00\x11Hello') == 'Hello'
assert make_printable('') == ''
My own testing suggests this approach is faster than functions that iterate over the string and return a result using str.join.
In Python 3,
def filter_nonprintable(text):
import itertools
# Use characters of control category
nonprintable = itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20),range(0x7f,0xa0))
# Use translate to remove all non-printable characters
return text.translate({character:None for character in nonprintable})
See this StackOverflow post on removing punctuation for how .translate() compares to regex & .replace()
The ranges can be generated via nonprintable = (ord(c) for c in (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode)) if unicodedata.category(c)=='Cc') using the Unicode character database categories as shown by #Ants Aasma.
This function uses list comprehensions and str.join, so it runs in linear time instead of O(n^2):
from curses.ascii import isprint
def printable(input):
return ''.join(char for char in input if isprint(char))
Yet another option in python 3:
re.sub(f'[^{re.escape(string.printable)}]', '', my_string)
Based on #Ber's answer, I suggest removing only control characters as defined in the Unicode character database categories:
import unicodedata
def filter_non_printable(s):
return ''.join(c for c in s if not unicodedata.category(c).startswith('C'))
The best I've come up with now is (thanks to the python-izers above)
def filter_non_printable(str):
return ''.join([c for c in str if ord(c) > 31 or ord(c) == 9])
This is the only way I've found out that works with Unicode characters/strings
Any better options?
In Python there's no POSIX regex classes
There are when using the regex library: https://pypi.org/project/regex/
It is well maintained and supports Unicode regex, Posix regex and many more. The usage (method signatures) is very similar to Python's re.
From the documentation:
[[:alpha:]]; [[:^alpha:]]
POSIX character classes are supported. These
are normally treated as an alternative form of \p{...}.
(I'm not affiliated, just a user.)
An elegant pythonic solution to stripping 'non printable' characters from a string in python is to use the isprintable() string method together with a generator expression or list comprehension depending on the use case ie. size of the string:
''.join(c for c in my_string if c.isprintable())
str.isprintable()
Return True if all characters in the string are printable or the string is empty, False otherwise. Nonprintable characters are those characters defined in the Unicode character database as “Other” or “Separator”, excepting the ASCII space (0x20) which is considered printable. (Note that printable characters in this context are those which should not be escaped when repr() is invoked on a string. It has no bearing on the handling of strings written to sys.stdout or sys.stderr.)
The one below performs faster than the others above. Take a look
''.join([x if x in string.printable else '' for x in Str])
Adapted from answers by Ants Aasma and shawnrad:
nonprintable = set(map(chr, list(range(0,32)) + list(range(127,160))))
ord_dict = {ord(character):None for character in nonprintable}
def filter_nonprintable(text):
return text.translate(ord_dict)
#use
str = "this is my string"
str = filter_nonprintable(str)
print(str)
tested on Python 3.7.7
To remove 'whitespace',
import re
t = """
\n\t<p> </p>\n\t<p> </p>\n\t<p> </p>\n\t<p> </p>\n\t<p>
"""
pat = re.compile(r'[\t\n]')
print(pat.sub("", t))
Error description
Run the copied and pasted python code report:
Python invalid non-printable character U+00A0
The cause of the error
The space in the copied code is not the same as the format in Python;
Solution
Delete the space and re-enter the space. For example, the red part in the above picture is an abnormal space. Delete and re-enter the space to run;
Source : Python invalid non-printable character U+00A0
I used this:
import sys
import unicodedata
# the test string has embedded characters, \u2069 \u2068
test_string = """"ABC. 6", "}"""
nonprintable = list((ord(c) for c in (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode)) if
unicodedata.category(c) in ['Cc','Cf']))
translate_dict = {character: None for character in nonprintable}
print("Before translate, using repr()", repr(test_string))
print("After translate, using repr()", repr(test_string.translate(translate_dict)))