I have a string in python2.7 like this,
This is some \u03c0 text that has to be cleaned\u2026! it\u0027s annoying!
How do i convert it to this,
This is some text that has to be cleaned! its annoying!
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dreftymac
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Sandeep Raju Prabhakar
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2Based on what do you want to filter the characters? Do you only want to preserve ASCII? – root Mar 10 '13 at 10:22
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@root, yes I just want to preserve the ascii – Sandeep Raju Prabhakar Mar 10 '13 at 10:33
1 Answers
87
Python 2.x
>>> s
'This is some \\u03c0 text that has to be cleaned\\u2026! it\\u0027s annoying!'
>>> print(s.decode('unicode_escape').encode('ascii','ignore'))
This is some text that has to be cleaned! it's annoying!
Python 3.x
>>> s = 'This is some \u03c0 text that has to be cleaned\u2026! it\u0027s annoying!'
>>> s.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
b"This is some text that has to be cleaned! it's annoying!"
Burhan Khalid
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also curious why you wrote `\\` but not `\`, isn't `\` outputs the same thing with your code ? – zhangxaochen Feb 21 '14 at 14:00
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4This also strips characters such as `ü, ä, ö` etc, which is not desired in most of the cases. – Floran Gmehlin Oct 05 '17 at 12:40
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@BurhanKhalid, in your code is 's' a string? If yes, then do i need to import some package to get decode and encode helper methods? – mdowes Jan 30 '19 at 06:58
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When i tried your code on my string, i get an exception which says 'str' object has not attribute 'decode'. I am using Python 3.6.6 version – mdowes Jan 30 '19 at 06:59
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1Please read [this](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html#text-versus-binary-data) and [this](https://timothybramlett.com/Strings_Bytes_and_Unicode_in_Python_2_and_3.html). – Burhan Khalid Jan 30 '19 at 07:38
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