Iterating over strings is unfortunately rather slow in Python. Regular expressions are over an order of magnitude faster for this kind of thing. You just have to build the character class yourself. The unicodedata module is quite helpful for this, especially the unicodedata.category() function. See Unicode Character Database for descriptions of the categories.
import unicodedata, re, itertools, sys
all_chars = (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(chr, itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20), range(0x7f,0xa0))))
control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))
def remove_control_chars(s):
return control_char_re.sub('', s)
For Python2
import unicodedata, re, sys
all_chars = (unichr(i) for i in xrange(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(unichr, range(0x00,0x20) + range(0x7f,0xa0)))
control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))
def remove_control_chars(s):
return control_char_re.sub('', s)
For some use-cases, additional categories (e.g. all from the control group might be preferable, although this might slow down the processing time and increase memory usage significantly. Number of characters per category:
def filter_nonprintable(text):
import itertools
# Use characters of control category
nonprintable = itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20),range(0x7f,0xa0))
# Use translate to remove all non-printable characters
return text.translate({character:None for character in nonprintable})
The ranges can be generated via nonprintable = (ord(c) for c in (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode)) if unicodedata.category(c)=='Cc') using the Unicode character database categories as shown by @Ants Aasma.
The following will work with Unicode input and is rather fast...
import sys
# build a table mapping all non-printable characters to None
NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE = {
i: None for i in range(0, sys.maxunicode + 1) if not chr(i).isprintable()
}
def make_printable(s):
"""Replace non-printable characters in a string."""
# the translate method on str removes characters
# that map to None from the string
return s.translate(NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE)
assert make_printable('Café') == 'Café'
assert make_printable('\x00\x11Hello') == 'Hello'
assert make_printable('') == ''
My own testing suggests this approach is faster than functions that iterate over the string and return a result using str.join.
An elegant pythonic solution to stripping 'non printable' characters from a string in python is to use the isprintable() string method together with a generator expression or list comprehension depending on the use case ie. size of the string:
''.join(c for c in my_string if c.isprintable())
str.isprintable()
Return True if all characters in the string are printable or the string is empty, False otherwise. Nonprintable characters are those characters defined in the Unicode character database as “Other” or “Separator”, excepting the ASCII space (0x20) which is considered printable. (Note that printable characters in this context are those which should not be escaped when repr() is invoked on a string. It has no bearing on the handling of strings written to sys.stdout or sys.stderr.)
Error description
Run the copied and pasted python code report:
Python invalid non-printable character U+00A0
The cause of the error
The space in the copied code is not the same as the format in Python;
Solution
Delete the space and re-enter the space. For example, the red part in the above picture is an abnormal space. Delete and re-enter the space to run;
import sys
import unicodedata
# the test string has embedded characters, \u2069 \u2068
test_string = """"ABC. 6", "}"""
nonprintable = list((ord(c) for c in (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode)) if
unicodedata.category(c) in ['Cc','Cf']))
translate_dict = {character: None for character in nonprintable}
print("Before translate, using repr()", repr(test_string))
print("After translate, using repr()", repr(test_string.translate(translate_dict)))