Removing strings containing ASCII

Question

I have a string with a bunch of non-ASCII characters and I would like to remove it. I used the following function in Python 3:

def removeNonAscii(s): 
    return "".join(filter(lambda x: ord(x)<128, s))

str1 = "Hi there!\xc2\xa0My\xc2\xa0name\xc2\xa0is\xc2\xa0Blue "
new = removeNonAscii(str1)

The new string becomes:

Hi there!MynameisBlue

Is it possible to get spaces between the string such that it is:

Hi there! My name is Blue

[`def removeNonAscii(s): return "".join(filter(lambda x: ord(x)<128, s))`](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1342000/how-to-replace-non-ascii-characters-in-string) and [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8689795/python-remove-non-ascii-characters-but-leave-periods-and-spaces) is one more helpful Q&A — Grijesh Chauhan, May 26 '13 at 05:37
@GrijeshChauhan that's what I used, but I still have the same problem as mentioned above — lost9123193, May 26 '13 at 05:41
for reference, the correct way to do the original task (without adding spaces) is `new=str1.encode('ascii','ignore')`, using the 'errors' argument to `encode()`. — kampu, May 26 '13 at 07:01

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 26 '13 at 05:39

3

The code below is equivalent to your current code, except that for a contiguous sequence of characters outside the range of US-ASCII, it will replace the whole sequence with a single space (ASCII 32).

import re
re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]+', " ", inputString)

Do note that control characters are allowed by the code above, and also the code in the question.

answered May 26 '13 at 05:39

nhahtdh

55,989
15
126
162

Just what I wanted! Thanks a lot! – lost9123193 May 26 '13 at 05:45

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 26 '13 at 05:45

regex wins here, but FWIW here is an itertools.groupby solution:

from itertools import groupby
text = "Hi there!\xc2\xa0My\xc2\xa0name\xc2\xa0is\xc2\xa0Blue "
def valid(c):
    return ord(c) < 128

def removeNonAscii(s):
    return ''.join(''.join(g) if k else ' ' for k, g in groupby(s, valid))

>>> removeNonAscii(text)
'Hi there! My name is Blue '

Removing strings containing ASCII

2 Answers2