How to remove special characters from strings in python? - python

I have millions of strings scraped from web like:
s = 'WHAT\xe2\x80\x99S UP DOC?'
type(s) == str # returns True
Special characters like in the string above are inevitable when scraping from the web. How should one remove all such special characters to retain just clean text? I am thinking of regular expression like this based on my very limited experience with unicode characters:
\\x.*[0-9]

The special characters are not actually multiple characters long, that is just how they are represented so your regex isn't going to work. If you print you will see the actual unicode (utf-8) characters
>>> s = 'WHAT\xe2\x80\x99S UP DOC?'
>>> print(s)
WHATâS UP DOC?
>>> repr(s)
"'WHATâ\\x80\\x99S UP DOC?'"
If you want to print only the ascii characters you can check if the character is in string.printable
>>> import string
>>> ''.join(i for i in s if i in string.printable)
'WHATS UP DOC?'

This thing worked for me as mentioned by Padriac in comments:
s.decode('ascii', errors='ignore')

Related

Converting bytes string with escape characters into a normal string

There are million questions and answers related to that but nothing worked with me.
I have a byte string that has escape characters, I want to decode it and convert it to string but without the escape characters and when printed it would be something like the following
>>> normal_string = "Hello\r\nWorld"
>>> print(normal_string)
Hello
World
Here is a part of my byte string
>>> bytes_string = b'Normal sentence\r\n\tIndented sentence\r\nanother one'
>>> converted_string = str(bytes_string, 'utf-8')
>>> print(converted_string)
Normal sentence\r\n\tIndented sentence\r\nanother one
and I want this
>>> print(string_that_I_want)
Normal sentence
Indented sentence
another one
>>> print(bytes_string.decode("unicode_escape"))
Normal sentence
Indented sentence
another one
>>>

Character classes using byte regex for characters encoded with multiple bit blocks

I would like to use regular expressions on bytestrings in python of which I know the encoding (utf-8). I am facing difficulties trying to use character classes that involve characters that are encoded using more than one bit block. They appear to become two or more 'characters' that are matched separately in the character class.
Performing the search on (unicode) strings instead is possible, but I would like to know if there is a solution to defining character classes for the case of bytestrings as well. Maybe it's just not possible!?
Below is a python 3 example that shows what happens when I try to replace different line breaks with '\n':
import re
def show_pattern(pattern):
print(f"\nPattern repr:\t{repr(pattern)}")
def test_sub(pattern, replacement, text):
print(f"Before repr:\t{repr(text)}")
result = re.sub(pattern, replacement, text)
print(f"After repr:\t{repr(result)}")
# Pattern for line breaks
PATTERN = '[' + "\u000A\u000B\u000C\u000D\u0085\u2028\u2029" + ']'
REPLACEMENT = '\n'
TEXT = "How should I replace my unicode string\u2028using utf-8-encoded bytes?"
show_pattern(PATTERN)
test_sub(PATTERN, REPLACEMENT, TEXT)
# expected output:
# Pattern repr: '[\n\x0b\x0c\r\x85\u2028\u2029]'
# Before repr: 'How should I replace my unicode string\u2028using utf-8-encoded bytes?'
# After repr: 'How should I replace my unicode string\nusing utf-8-encoded bytes?'
ENCODED_PATTERN = PATTERN.encode('utf-8')
ENCODED_REPLACEMENT = REPLACEMENT.encode('utf-8')
ENCODED_TEXT = TEXT.encode('utf-8')
show_pattern(ENCODED_PATTERN)
test_sub(ENCODED_PATTERN, ENCODED_REPLACEMENT, ENCODED_TEXT)
# expected output:
# Pattern repr: b'[\n\x0b\x0c\r\xc2\x85\xe2\x80\xa8\xe2\x80\xa9]'
# Before repr: b'How should I replace my unicode string\xe2\x80\xa8using utf-8-encoded bytes?'
# After repr: b'How should I replace my unicode string\n\n\nusing utf-8-encoded bytes?'
In the encoded version, I end up with three '\n''s instead of one. Similar things happen for a more complicated document where it's not obvious what the correct output should be.
You may use an alternation based pattern rather than a character class, as you will want to match sequences of bytes:
PATTERN = "|".join(['\u000A','\u000B','\u000C','\u000D','\u0085','\u2028','\u2029'])
See the online demo.
If you prefer to initialize the pattern from a string use
CHARS = "\u000A\u000B\u000C\u000D\u0085\u2028\u2029"
PATTERN = "|".join(CHARS)

Python prevent decoding HEX to ASCII while removing backslashes from my Var

I want to strip some unwanted symbols from my variable. In this case the symbols are backslashes. I am using a HEX number, and as an example I will show some short simple code down bellow. But I don't want python to convert my HEX to ASCII, how would I prevent this from happening.? I have some long shell codes for asm to work with later which are really long and removing \ by hand is a long process. I know there are different ways like using echo -e "x\x\x\x" > output etc, but my whole script will be written in python.
Thanks
>>> a = "\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76"
>>> b = a.strip("\\")
>>> print b
1�Phtv
>>> a = "\x31\x32\x33\x34\x35\x36"
>>> b = a.strip("\\")
>>> print b
123456
At the end I would like it to print my var:
>>> print b
x31x32x33x34x35x36
There are no backslashes in your variable:
>>> a = "\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76"
>>> print(a)
1ÀPhtv
Take newline for example: writing "\n" in Python will give you string with one character -- newline -- and no backslashes. See string literals docs for full syntax of these.
Now, if you really want to write string with such backslashes, you can do it with r modifier:
>>> a = r"\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76"
>>> print(a)
\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76
>>> print(a.replace('\\', ''))
x31xC0x50x68x74x76
But if you want to convert a regular string to hex-coded symbols, you can do it character by character, converting it to number ("\x31" == "1" --> 49), then to hex ("0x31"), and finally stripping the first character:
>>> a = "\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76"
>>> print(''.join([hex(ord(x))[1:] for x in a]))
'x31xc0x50x68x74x76'
There are two problems in your Code.
First the simple one:
strip() just removes one occurrence. So you should use replace("\\", ""). This will replace every backslash with "", which is the same as removing it.
The second problem is pythons behavior with backslashes:
To get your example working you need to append an 'r' in front of your string to indicate, that it is a raw string. a = r"\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76". In raw strings, a backlash doesn't escape a character but just stay a backslash.
>>> r"\x31\xC0\x50\x68\x74\x76"
'\\x31\\xC0\\x50\\x68\\x74\\x76'

Remove accented characters form string - Python

I get some data from a webpage and read it like this in python
origional_doc = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
Sometimes this url has characters such as é and ä and ect., how could I remove these characters, from the string, right now this is what I am trying,
import unicodedata
origional_doc = ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', origional_doc) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))
But I get an error
TypeError: must be unicode, not str
This should work. It will eliminate all characters that are not ascii.
original_doc = (original_doc.decode('unicode_escape').encode('ascii','ignore'))
using re you can sub all characters that are in a certain hexadecimal ascii range.
>>> re.sub('[\x80-\xFF]','','é and ä and ect')
' and and ect'
You can also do the inverse and sub anything thats NOT in the basic 128 characters:
>>> re.sub('[^\x00-\x7F]','','é and ä and ect')
' and and ect'

Why python string cut returns 11 symbols when 12 is requested?

I use python 2.7 on OSX 10.9 and would like to cut unicode string (05. Чайка.mp3) by 12 symbols, so I use mp3file[:12] to cut it by 12 symbols. But in result I get the string like 05. Чайка.m, which is 11 symbols only. But len(mp3file[:12]) returns 12. Looks like the problem is with Russian symbol й.
What could be wrong here?
The main problem with this - I can not normally display strings with {:<12}'.format(mp3file[:12]).
You have unicode text with a combining character:
u'05. \u0427\u0430\u0438\u0306\u043a\u0430.m'
The U+0306 is a COMBINING BREVE codepoint, ̆, it combines with the preceding и CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER I to form:
>>> print u'\u0438'
и
>>> print u'\u0438\u0306'
й
You can normalize that to the combined form, U+0439 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHORT I instead:
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'\u0438\u0306')
u'\u0439'
This uses the unicodedata.normalize() function to produce a composed normal form.
A user-perceived character (grapheme cluster) such as й may be constructed using several Unicode codepoints, each Unicode codepoints in turn may be encoded using several bytes depending on a character encoding.
Therefore number of characters that you see may be less the corresponding sizes of Unicode or byte strings that encode them and you can also truncate inside a Unicode character if you slice a bytestring or inside a user-perceived character if you slice a Unicode string even if it is in NFC Unicode normalization form. Obviously, it is not desirable.
To properly count characters, you could use \X regex that matches eXtended grapheme cluster (a language independent "visual character"):
import regex as re # $ pip install regex
characters = re.findall(u'\\X', u'05. \u0427\u0430\u0438\u0306\u043a\u0430.m')
print(characters)
# -> [u'0', u'5', u'.', u' ', u'\u0427', u'\u0430',
# u'\u0438\u0306', u'\u043a', u'\u0430', u'.', u'm']
Notice, that even without normalization: u'\u0438\u0306' is a separate character 'й'.
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'\u0646\u200D ') # 3 Unicode codepoints
u'\u0646\u200d ' # still 3 codepoints, NFC hasn't combined them
>>> import regex as re
>>> re.findall(u'\\X', u'\u0646\u200D ') # same 3 codepoints
[u'\u0646\u200d', u' '] # 2 grapheme clusters
See also, In Python, how do I most efficiently chunk a UTF-8 string for REST delivery?

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