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Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

I need to replace all non-ASCII (\x00-\x7F) characters with a space. I'm surprised that this is not dead-easy in Python, unless I'm missing something. The following function simply removes all non-ASCII characters:

def remove_non_ascii_1(text):
 return ''.join(i for i in text if ord(i)<128)

And this one replaces non-ASCII characters with the amount of spaces as per the amount of bytes in the character code point (i.e. the – character is replaced with 3 spaces):

def remove_non_ascii_2(text):
 return re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]',' ', text)

How can I replace all non-ASCII characters with a single space?

Of the myriad of similar SO questions, none address character replacement as opposed to stripping, and additionally address all non-ascii characters not a specific character.

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20

@dstromberg: slower; str.join() needs a list (it'll pass over the values twice), and a generator expression will first be converted to one. Giving it a list comprehension is simply faster. See this post.

Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters

2013年11月19日 18:42:49 +00:00
Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 18:42
1

The first piece of code will insert multiple blanks per character if you feed it a UTF-8 byte string.

Mark Ransom
– Mark Ransom

2013年11月19日 19:13:09 +00:00
Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 19:13
@MarkRansom: I was assuming this to be Python 3.

Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters

2013年11月19日 19:15:04 +00:00
Commented Nov 19, 2013 at 19:15
3

"– character is replaced with 3 spaces" in the question implies that the input is a bytestring (not Unicode) and therefore Python 2 is used (otherwise ''.join would fail). If OP wants a single space per Unicode codepoint then the input should be decoded into Unicode first.

jfs
– jfs

2016年02月19日 17:01:53 +00:00
Commented Feb 19, 2016 at 17:01

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Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

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