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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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2

Though this is rather inelegant, it is very readable. Thank you.

dotancohen
– dotancohen

2016年08月21日 06:28:49 +00:00
Commented Aug 21, 2016 at 6:28
1

+1 for unicode handling... @dotancohen IMNSHO "readable" implies "practical" which adds to "elegant", so i'd say "a bit inelegant"

qneill
– qneill

2016年10月01日 00:00:30 +00:00
Commented Oct 1, 2016 at 0:00
notional -1 for calling non-ascii characters "trash"

axolotl
– axolotl

2022年02月10日 21:30:03 +00:00
Commented Feb 10, 2022 at 21:30
@axolotl I meant no offense. If I recall correctly when I was writing it I was indeed dealing with very weird characters that are not from any alphabet.

parsecer
– parsecer

2022年02月10日 23:01:13 +00:00
Commented Feb 10, 2022 at 23:01
1

I know :) it's a light hearted comment

axolotl
– axolotl

2022年02月10日 23:02:22 +00:00
Commented Feb 10, 2022 at 23:02

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Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

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