CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringpython-2.7escaping
evamvid
evamvid

Reputation: 861

Why doesn't this replace function work?

So I'm using this line of Python to replace some weird characters in a string;

title = title.replace('\xc3', 'e').replace('\xa9', 's')

The weird string is:

"B\xc3\xa9same Mucho"

It has some Spanish-style accents, and I figured it would be simpler to try to get rid of them instead of trying to implement the accents.

But it doesn't replace the affected parts.

What's wrong with the line?

Thanks!

evamvid

Upvotes: 0

Views: 338

Answers (1)

kojiro
kojiro

Reputation: 77127

Assuming you're using Python 2.7, you're just having a classic bad encoding day. Python 2 is a little notorious for its Unicode(De|En)codeError. If you really want to replace those characters, observe that:

>>> utitle = title.decode('utf-8')
u'B\xe9same Mucho'

so

>>> utitle.replace(u'\xe9', 'e')
u'Besame Mucho'

But you really want to be dealing with unicode the whole time, and the characters there are really fine, so just do the decode.

This is one area in which Python 3 is much better than Python 2.

Upvotes: 1

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