I am trying to split a Unicode string into words (simplistic), like this:
print re.findall(r'(?u)\w+', "раз два три")
What I expect to see is:
['раз','два','три']
But what I really get is:
['\xd1', '\xd0', '\xd0', '\xd0', '\xd0\xb2\xd0', '\xd1', '\xd1', '\xd0']
What am I doing wrong?
Edit:
If I use u in front of the string:
print re.findall(r'(?u)\w+', u"раз два три")
I get:
[u'\u0440\u0430\u0437', u'\u0434\u0432\u0430', u'\u0442\u0440\u0438']
Edit 2:
Aaaaand it seems like I should have read docs first:
print re.findall(r'(?u)\w+', u"раз два три")[0].encode('utf-8')
Will give me:
раз
Just to make sure though, does that sound like a proper way of approaching it?
You're actually getting the stuff you expect in the unicode case. You only think you are not because of the weird escaping due to the fact that you're looking at the reprs of the strings, not not printing their unescaped values. (This is just how lists are displayed.)
>>> words = [u'\u0440\u0430\u0437', u'\u0434\u0432\u0430', u'\u0442\u0440\u0438']
>>> for w in words:
... print w # This uses the terminal encoding -- _only_ utilize interactively
...
раз
два
три
>>> u'раз' == u'\u0440\u0430\u0437'
True
Don't miss my remark about printing these unicode strings. Normally if you were going to send them to screen, a file, over the wire, etc. you need to manually encode them into the correct encoding. When you use print, Python tries to leverage your terminal's encoding, but it can only do that if there is a terminal. Because you don't generally know if there is one, you should only rely on this in the interactive interpreter, and always encode to the right encoding explicitly otherwise.
In this simple splitting-on-whitespace approach, you might not want to use regex at all but simply to use the unicode.split method.
>>> u"раз два три".split()
[u'\u0440\u0430\u0437', u'\u0434\u0432\u0430', u'\u0442\u0440\u0438']
Your top (bytestring) example does not work because re basically assumes all bytestrings are ASCII for its semantics, but yours was not. Using unicode strings allows you to get the right semantics for your alphabet and locale. As much as possible, textual data should always be represented using unicode rather than str.
Related
I have a string s, its contents are variable. How can I make it a raw string? I'm looking for something similar to the r'' method.
i believe what you're looking for is the str.encode("string-escape") function. For example, if you have a variable that you want to 'raw string':
a = '\x89'
a.encode('unicode_escape')
'\\x89'
Note: Use string-escape for python 2.x and older versions
I was searching for a similar solution and found the solution via:
casting raw strings python
Raw strings are not a different kind of string. They are a different way of describing a string in your source code. Once the string is created, it is what it is.
Since strings in Python are immutable, you cannot "make it" anything different. You can however, create a new raw string from s, like this:
raw_s = r'{}'.format(s)
As of Python 3.6, you can use the following (similar to #slashCoder):
def to_raw(string):
return fr"{string}"
my_dir ="C:\data\projects"
to_raw(my_dir)
yields 'C:\\data\\projects'. I'm using it on a Windows 10 machine to pass directories to functions.
raw strings apply only to string literals. they exist so that you can more conveniently express strings that would be modified by escape sequence processing. This is most especially useful when writing out regular expressions, or other forms of code in string literals. if you want a unicode string without escape processing, just prefix it with ur, like ur'somestring'.
For Python 3, the way to do this that doesn't add double backslashes and simply preserves \n, \t, etc. is:
a = 'hello\nbobby\nsally\n'
a.encode('unicode-escape').decode().replace('\\\\', '\\')
print(a)
Which gives a value that can be written as CSV:
hello\nbobby\nsally\n
There doesn't seem to be a solution for other special characters, however, that may get a single \ before them. It's a bummer. Solving that would be complex.
For example, to serialize a pandas.Series containing a list of strings with special characters in to a textfile in the format BERT expects with a CR between each sentence and a blank line between each document:
with open('sentences.csv', 'w') as f:
current_idx = 0
for idx, doc in sentences.items():
# Insert a newline to separate documents
if idx != current_idx:
f.write('\n')
# Write each sentence exactly as it appared to one line each
for sentence in doc:
f.write(sentence.encode('unicode-escape').decode().replace('\\\\', '\\') + '\n')
This outputs (for the Github CodeSearchNet docstrings for all languages tokenized into sentences):
Makes sure the fast-path emits in order.
#param value the value to emit or queue up\n#param delayError if true, errors are delayed until the source has terminated\n#param disposable the resource to dispose if the drain terminates
Mirrors the one ObservableSource in an Iterable of several ObservableSources that first either emits an item or sends\na termination notification.
Scheduler:\n{#code amb} does not operate by default on a particular {#link Scheduler}.
#param the common element type\n#param sources\nan Iterable of ObservableSource sources competing to react first.
A subscription to each source will\noccur in the same order as in the Iterable.
#return an Observable that emits the same sequence as whichever of the source ObservableSources first\nemitted an item or sent a termination notification\n#see ReactiveX operators documentation: Amb
...
Just format like that:
s = "your string"; raw_s = r'{0}'.format(s)
With a little bit correcting #Jolly1234's Answer:
here is the code:
raw_string=path.encode('unicode_escape').decode()
s = "hel\nlo"
raws = '%r'%s #coversion to raw string
#print(raws) will print 'hel\nlo' with single quotes.
print(raws[1:-1]) # will print hel\nlo without single quotes.
#raws[1:-1] string slicing is performed
The solution, which worked for me was:
fr"{orignal_string}"
Suggested in comments by #ChemEnger
I suppose repr function can help you:
s = 't\n'
repr(s)
"'t\\n'"
repr(s)[1:-1]
't\\n'
Just simply use the encode function.
my_var = 'hello'
my_var_bytes = my_var.encode()
print(my_var_bytes)
And then to convert it back to a regular string do this
my_var_bytes = 'hello'
my_var = my_var_bytes.decode()
print(my_var)
--EDIT--
The following does not make the string raw but instead encodes it to bytes and decodes it.
given a character like "✮" (\xe2\x9c\xae), for example, can be others like "Σ", "д" or "Λ") I want to find the "actual" length that character takes when printed onscreen
for example
len("✮")
len("\xe2\x9c\xae")
both return 3, but it should be 1
You may try like this:
unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'✮')
len(u"✮")
UTF-8 is an unicode encoding which uses more than one byte for special characters. Check unicodedata.normalize()
My answer to a similar question:
You are looking for the rendering width from the current output context. For graphical UIs, there is usually a method to directly query this information; for text environments, all you can do is guess what a conformant rendering engine would probably do, and hope that the actual engine matches your expectations.
Given two nearly identical text files (plain text, created in MacVim), I get different results when reading them into a variable in Python. I want to know why this is and how I can produce consistent behavior.
For example, f1.txt looks like this:
This isn't a great example, but it works.
And f2.txt looks like this:
This isn't a great example, but it wasn't meant to be.
"But doesn't it demonstrate the problem?," she said.
When I read these files in, using something like the following:
f = open("f1.txt","r")
x = f.read()
I get the following when I look at the variables in the console. f1.txt:
>>> x
"This isn't a great example, but it works.\n\n"
And f2.txt:
>>> y
'This isn\'t a great example, but it wasn\'t meant to be. \n"But doesn\'t it demonstrate the problem?," she said.\n\n'
In other words, f1 comes in with only escaped newlines, while f2 also has its single quotes escaped.
repr() shows what's going on. first for f1:
>>> repr(x)
'"This isn\'t a great example, but it works.\\n\\n"'
And f2:
>>> repr(y)
'\'This isn\\\'t a great example, but it wasn\\\'t meant to be. \\n"But doesn\\\'t it demonstrate the problem?," she said.\\n\\n\''
This kind of behavior is driving me crazy. What's going on and how do I make it consistent? If it matters, I'm trying to read in plain text, manipulate it, and eventually write it out so that it shows the properly escaped characters (for pasting into Javascript code).
Python is giving you a string literal which, if you gave it back to Python, would result in the same string. This is known as the repr() (short for "representation") of the string. This may not (probably won't, in fact) match the string as it was originally specified, since there are so many ways to do that, and Python does not record anything about how it was originally specified.
It uses double quotes around your first example, which works fine because it doesn't contain any double quotes. The second string contains double quotes, so it can't use double quotes as a delimiter. Instead it uses single quotes and uses backslashes to escape the single quotes in the string (it doesn't have to escape the double quotes this way, and there are more of them than there are single quotes). This keeps the representation as short as possible.
There is no reason for this behavior to drive you crazy and no need to try to make it consistent. You only get the repr() of a string when you are peeking at values in Python's interactive mode. When you actually print or otherwise use the string, you get the string itself, not a reconstituted string literal.
If you want to get a JavaScript string literal, the easiest way is to use the json module:
import json
print json.dumps('I said, "Hello, world!"')
Both f1 and f2 contain perfectly normal, unescaped single quotes.
The fact that their repr looks different is meaningless.
There are a variety of different ways to represent the same string. For example, these are all equivalent literals:
"abc'def'ghi"
'abc\'def\'ghi'
'''abc'def'ghi'''
r"abc'def'ghi"
The repr function on a string always just generates some literal that is a valid representation of that string, but you shouldn't depend on exactly which one it generate. (In fact, you should rarely use it for anything but debugging purposes in the first place.)
Since the language doesn't define anywhere what algorithm it uses to generate a repr, it could be different for each version of each implementation.
Most of them will try to be clever, using single or double quotes to avoid as many escaped internal quotes as possible, but even that isn't guaranteed. If you really want to know the algorithm for a particular implementation and version, you pretty much have to look at the source. For example, in CPython 3.3, inside unicode_repr, it counts the number of quotes of each type; then if there are single quotes but no double quotes, it uses " instead of '.
If you want "the" representation of a string, you're out of luck, because there is no such thing. But if you want some particular representation of a string, that's no problem. You just have to know what format you want; most formats, someone's already written the code, and often it's in the standard library. You can make C literal strings, JSON-encoded strings, strings that can fit into ASCII RFC822 headers… But all of those formats have different rules from each other (and from Python literals), so you have to use the right function for the job.
Conclusion: It's impossible to override or disable Python's built-in escape sequence processing, such that, you can skip using the raw prefix specifier. I dug into Python's internals to figure this out. So if anyone tries designing objects that work on complex strings (like regex) as part of some kind of framework, make sure to specify in the docstrings that string arguments to the object's __init__() MUST include the r prefix!
Original question: I am finding it a bit difficult to force Python to not "change" anything about a user-inputted string, which may contain among other things, regex or escaped hexadecimal sequences. I've already tried various combinations of raw strings, .encode('string-escape') (and its decode counterpart), but I can't find the right approach.
Given an escaped, hexadecimal representation of the Documentation IPv6 address 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334, using .encode(), this small script (called x.py):
#!/usr/bin/env python
class foo(object):
__slots__ = ("_bar",)
def __init__(self, input):
if input is not None:
self._bar = input.encode('string-escape')
else:
self._bar = "qux?"
def _get_bar(self): return self._bar
bar = property(_get_bar)
#
x = foo("\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34")
print x.bar
Will yield the following output when executed:
$ ./x.py
\x01\r\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a.\x03ps4
Note the \x20 got converted to an ASCII space character, along with a few others. This is basically correct due to Python processing the escaped hex sequences and converting them to their printable ASCII values.
This can be solved if the initializer to foo() was treated as a raw string (and the .encode() call removed), like this:
x = foo(r"\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34")
However, my end goal is to create a kind of framework that can be used and I want to hide these kinds of "implementation details" from the end user. If they called foo() with the above IPv6 address in escaped hexadecimal form (without the raw specifier) and immediately print it back out, they should get back exactly what they put in w/o knowing or using the raw specifier. So I need to find a way to have foo's __init__() do whatever processing is necessary to enable that.
Edit: Per this SO question, it seems it's a defect of Python, in that it always performs some kind of escape sequence processing. There does not appear to be any kind of facility to completely turn off escape sequence processing, even temporarily. Sucks. I guess I am going to have to research subclassing str to create something like rawstr that intelligently determines what escape sequences Python processed in a string, and convert them back to their original format. This is not going to be fun...
Edit2: Another example, given the sample regex below:
"^.{0}\xcb\x00\x71[\x00-\xff]"
If I assign this to a var or pass it to a function without using the raw specifier, the \x71 gets converted to the letter q. Even if I add .encode('string-escape') or .replace('\\', '\\\\'), the escape sequences are still processed. thus resulting in this output:
"^.{0}\xcb\x00q[\x00-\xff]"
How can I stop this, again, without using the raw specifier? Is there some way to "turn off" the escape sequence processing or "revert" it after the fact thus that the q turns back into \x71? Is there a way to process the string and escape the backslashes before the escape sequence processing happens?
I think you have an understandable confusion about a difference between Python string literals (source code representation), Python string objects in memory, and how that objects can be printed (in what format they can be represented in the output).
If you read some bytes from a file into a bytestring you can write them back as is.
r"" exists only in source code there is no such thing at runtime i.e., r"\x" and "\\x" are equal, they may even be the exact same string object in memory.
To see that input is not corrupted, you could print each byte as an integer:
print " ".join(map(ord, raw_input("input something")))
Or just echo as is (there could be a difference but it is unrelated to your "string-escape" issue):
print raw_input("input something")
Identity function:
def identity(obj):
return obj
If you do nothing to the string then your users will receive the exact same object back. You can provide examples in the docs what you consider a concise readable way to represent input string as Python literals. If you find confusing to work with binary strings such as "\x20\x01" then you could accept ascii hex-representation instead: "2001" (you could use binascii.hexlify/unhexlify to convert one to another).
The regex case is more complex because there are two languages:
Escapes sequences are interpreted by Python according to its string literal syntax
Regex engine interprets the string object as a regex pattern that also has its own escape sequences
I think you will have to go the join route.
Here's an example:
>>> m = {chr(c): '\\x{0}'.format(hex(c)[2:].zfill(2)) for c in xrange(0,256)}
>>>
>>> x = "\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34"
>>> print ''.join(map(m.get, x))
\x20\x01\x0d\xb8\x85\xa3\x00\x00\x00\x00\x8a\x2e\x03\x70\x73\x34
I'm not entirely sure why you need that though. If your code needs to interact with other pieces of code, I'd suggest that you agree on a defined format, and stick to it.
I already came up with this problem, but after some testing I decided to create a new question with some more specific Infos:
I am reading user accounts with python-ldap (and Python 2.7) from our Active Directory. This does work well, but I have problems with special chars. They do look like UTF-8 encoded strings when printed on the console. The goal is to write them into a MySQL DB, but I don't get those strings into proper UTF-8 from the beginning.
Example (fullentries is my array with all the AD entries):
fullentries[23][1].decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
print fullentries[23][1].encode('utf-8', 'ignore')
print fullentries[23][1].encode('latin1', 'ignore')
print repr(fullentries[23][1])
A second test with a string inserted by hand as follows:
testentry = "M\xc3\xbcller"
testentry.decode('utf-8', 'ignore')
print testentry.encode('utf-8', 'ignore')
print testentry.encode('latin1', 'ignore')
print repr(testentry)
The output of the first example ist:
M\xc3\xbcller
M\xc3\xbcller
u'M\\xc3\\xbcller'
Edit: If I try to replace the double backslashes with .replace('\\\\','\\) the output remains the same.
The output of the second example:
Müller
M�ller
'M\xc3\xbcller'
Is there any way to get the AD output properly encoded? I already read a lot of documentation, but it all states that LDAPv3 gives you strictly UTF-8 encoded strings. Active Directory uses LDAPv3.
My older question this topic is here: Writing UTF-8 String to MySQL with Python
Edit: Added repr(s) infos
First, know that printing to a Windows console is often the step that garbles data, so for your tests, you should print repr(s) to see the precise bytes you have in your string.
You need to find out how the data from AD is encoded. Again, print repr(s) will let you see the content of the data.
UPDATED:
OK, it looks like you're getting strange strings somehow. There might be a way to get them better, but you can adapt in any case, though it isn't pretty:
u.decode('unicode_escape').encode('iso8859-1').decode('utf8')
You might want to look into whether you can get the data in a more natural format.