pythonpython-2.7unicodebeautifulsouputf-8

Reputation: 7101

How to remove \xa0 from string in Python?

I am currently using Beautiful Soup to parse an HTML file and calling get_text(), but it seems like I'm being left with a lot of \xa0 Unicode representing spaces. Is there an efficient way to remove all of them in Python 2.7, and change them into spaces? I guess the more generalized question would be, is there a way to remove Unicode formatting?

I tried using: line = line.replace(u'\xa0',' '), as suggested by another thread, but that changed the \xa0's to u's, so now I have "u"s everywhere instead. ):

EDIT: The problem seems to be resolved by str.replace(u'\xa0', ' ').encode('utf-8'), but just doing .encode('utf-8') without replace() seems to cause it to spit out even weirder characters, \xc2 for instance. Can anyone explain this?

Upvotes: 385

Answers (16)

Ali Raza Bhayani

Reputation: 3145

After trying several methods, to summarize it, this is how I did it. Following are two ways of avoiding/removing \xa0 characters from parsed HTML string.

Assume we have our raw html as following:

raw_html = '<p>Dear Parent, </p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">This is a test message, </span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">kindly ignore it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Thanks</span></p>'

So lets try to clean this HTML string:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
raw_html = '<p>Dear Parent, </p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">This is a test message, </span><span style="font-size: 1rem;">kindly ignore it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Thanks</span></p>'
text_string = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml").text
print text_string
#u'Dear Parent,\xa0This is a test message,\xa0kindly ignore it.\xa0Thanks'

The above code produces these characters \xa0 in the string. To remove them properly, we can use two ways.

Method # 1 (Recommended): The first one is BeautifulSoup's get_text method with strip argument as True So our code becomes:

clean_text = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml").get_text(strip=True)
print clean_text
# Dear Parent,This is a test message,kindly ignore it.Thanks

Method # 2: The other option is to use python's library unicodedata, specifically unicodedata.normalize

import unicodedata
text_string = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml").text
clean_text = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD",text_string)
print clean_text
# u'Dear Parent,This is a test message,kindly ignore it.Thanks'

I have also detailed these methods on this blog which you may want to refer.

Upvotes: 46

Chirag

Reputation: 33

Was facing the same issue, got this done and went well.

df = df.replace(u'\xa0', u'', regex=True)

All instances of \xa0 get replaced.

Upvotes: 2

8bitjunkie

Reputation: 13265

In Python, \xa0 is a character escape sequence that represents a non-breaking space.

A non-breaking space is a space character that prevents line breaks and word wrapping between two words separated by it.

You can get rid of them by running replace on a string which contains them:

my_string.replace('\xa0', '') # no more xa0

Upvotes: 12

Amro Younes

Reputation: 1301

This is how I solved this issue as I encountered \xao in html encoded string.

I discovered a None breaking space is inserted to ensure that a word and subsequent HTML markup is not separated due to resizing of a page.

This presents a problem for the parsing code as it introduced codec encoding issues. What made it hard was that we are not privy to the encoding used. From Windows machines it can be latin-1 or CP1252 (Western ISO), but more recent OSes have standardized to UTF-8. By normalizing unicode data, we strip \xa0

my_string = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', my_string).encode('ASCII', 'ignore')

Upvotes: 1

SaemaMiftah

Reputation: 39

You can try string.strip()
It worked for me! :)

Upvotes: 3

samwize

Reputation: 27383

\xa0 is actually non-breaking space in Latin1 (ISO 8859-1), also chr(160). You should replace it with a space.

string = string.replace(u'\xa0', u' ')

When .encode('utf-8'), it will encode the unicode to utf-8, that means every unicode could be represented by 1 to 4 bytes. For this case, \xa0 is represented by 2 bytes \xc2\xa0.

Read up on http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html.

Please note: this answer in from 2012, Python has moved on, you should be able to use unicodedata.normalize now

Upvotes: 436

Max

Reputation: 1844

Python recognize it like a space character, so you can split it without args and join by a normal whitespace:

line = ' '.join(line.split())

Upvotes: 17

ranaFire

Reputation: 7

Generic version with the regular expression (It will remove all the control characters):

import re
def remove_control_chart(s):
    return re.sub(r'\\x..', '', s)

Upvotes: 1

shiva

Reputation: 429

Try this code

import re
re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+','','paste your string here').decode('utf-8','ignore').strip()

Upvotes: 13

Jamie

Reputation: 3488

There's many useful things in Python's unicodedata library. One of them is the .normalize() function.

Try:

new_str = unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", unicode_str)

Replacing NFKD with any of the other methods listed in the link above if you don't get the results you're after.

Upvotes: 338

user3590113

Reputation: 537

Try using .strip() at the end of your line line.strip() worked well for me

Upvotes: 32

andilabs

Reputation: 23361

I end up here while googling for the problem with not printable character. I use MySQL UTF-8 general_ci and deal with polish language. For problematic strings I have to procced as follows:

text=text.replace('\xc2\xa0', ' ')

It is just fast workaround and you probablly should try something with right encoding setup.

Upvotes: 9

Mark

Reputation: 71

In Beautiful Soup, you can pass get_text() the strip parameter, which strips white space from the beginning and end of the text. This will remove \xa0 or any other white space if it occurs at the start or end of the string. Beautiful Soup replaced an empty string with \xa0 and this solved the problem for me.

mytext = soup.get_text(strip=True)

Upvotes: 7

user1774699

Reputation:

I ran into this same problem pulling some data from a sqlite3 database with python. The above answers didn't work for me (not sure why), but this did: line = line.decode('ascii', 'ignore') However, my goal was deleting the \xa0s, rather than replacing them with spaces.

I got this from this super-helpful unicode tutorial by Ned Batchelder.

Upvotes: 15

dda

Reputation: 6213

0xA0 (Unicode) is 0xC2A0 in UTF-8. .encode('utf8') will just take your Unicode 0xA0 and replace with UTF-8's 0xC2A0. Hence the apparition of 0xC2s... Encoding is not replacing, as you've probably realized now.

Upvotes: 4

user278064

Reputation: 10180

try this:

string.replace('\\xa0', ' ')

Upvotes: 21

How to remove \xa0 from string in Python?

Answers (16)

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