How can I strip unwanted characters from a string in python?

Question

I have the following string:

text = 'adsfklaiin2007daf adf adflkajf;j 2008afadfkjkj'

I want to return:

2007 2008

Any way to do this in Python?

check this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1450897/python-removing-characters-except-digits-from-string/1450900#1450900 — arie, Apr 26 '11 at 15:30
What if it's a specific text I want to keep. It might be a number but it might not. For example, what if I wanted to keep 2007d 2008a or some other particular string of text? — coderman, Apr 26 '11 at 15:45

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:30

7

This is a classic case for regular expressions. Using the re python library you get:

re.findall('\d{4}', "yourStringHere")

This will return a list of all four digit items found in the string. Simply adjust your regex as needed.

answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:30

Spencer Rathbun

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score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:31

5

import re
num = re.compile('[\d]*')
numbers = [number for number in num.findall(text) if number]
['2007', '2008']

answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:31

Cédric Julien

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:27

3

>>> import re
>>> text = 'adsfklaiin2007daf adf adflkajf;j 2008afadfkjkj'
>>> re.sub("[^0-9]"," ",text)
'          2007                   2008         '

I will leave it to you to format the output.

answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:27

ghostdog74

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:24

1

str.translate

text.translate(None, ''.join(chr(n) for n in range(0xFF) if chr(n) not in ' 01234567890')

You can probably construct a better table of characters to skip and make it prettier, but that's the general idea.

answered Apr 26 '11 at 15:24

nmichaels

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How can I strip unwanted characters from a string in python?

4 Answers4