On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 05:22:12PM -0700, Tamas Hegedus wrote: > Hi! > > Do you have a convinient, easy way to remove special charachters from > u'strings'? > > Replacing: > ÀÁÂÃÄÅ => A > èéêë => e > etc. > 'L0xe1szl0xf3' => Laszlo > or something like that: > 'L\xc3\xa1szl\xc3\xb3' => Laszlo
for the examples you have given, this works: from unicodedata import normalize def strip_composition(unichar): """ Return the first character from the canonical decomposition of a unicode character. This wil typically be the unaccented version of the character passed in (in Latin regions, at least). """ return normalize('NFD', unichar)[0] def remove_special_chars(anystr): """ strip_composition of the whole string """ return ''.join(map(strip_composition, unicode(anystr))) for i in ('ÀÁÂÃÄÅ', 'èéêë', u'L\xe1szl\xf3', 'L\xc3\xa1szl\xc3\xb3'): print i, '->', remove_special_chars(i) produces: ÀÁÂÃÄÅ -> AAAAAA èéêë -> eeee László -> Laszlo László -> Laszlo although building a translation mapping is, in general, faster. You could use the above to build that map automatically, like this: def build_translation(sample, table=None): """ Return a translation table that strips composition characters out of a sample unicode string. If a table is supplied, it will be updated. """ assert isinstance(sample, unicode), 'sample must be unicode' if table is None: table = {} for i in set(sample) - set(table): table[ord(i)] = ord(strip_composition(i)) return table this is much faster on larger strings, or if you have many strings, but know the alphabet (so you compute the table once). You might also try to build the table incrementally, for i in strings: i = i.translate(table) try: i.encode('ascii') except UnicodeEncodeError: table = build_translation(i, table) i = i.translate(table) stripped.append(i) of course this won't work if you have other, non-ascii but non-composite, chars in your strings. -- John Lenton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- Random fortune: El que está en la aceña, muele; que el otro va y viene.
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