Stripping non printable characters from a string in python

Question

I use to run

$s =~ s/[^[:print:]]//g;

on Perl to get rid of non printable characters.

In Python there's no POSIX regex classes, and I can't write [:print:] having it mean what I want. I know of no way in Python to detect if a character is printable or not.

What would you do?

EDIT: It has to support Unicode characters as well. The string.printable way will happily strip them out of the output. curses.ascii.isprint will return false for any unicode character.

Answer 1

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

all_chars = (unichr(i) for i in xrange(0x110000))
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) == 'Cc')
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(unichr, range(0,32) + range(127,160)))

control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))

def remove_control_chars(s):
    return control_char_re.sub('', s)

Answer 2

As far as I know, the most pythonic/efficient method would be:

import string

filtered_string = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, myStr)

Answer 3

You could try setting up a filter using the unicodedata.category() function:

import unicodedata
printable = {'Lu', 'Ll'}
def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join(c for c in str if unicodedata.category(c) in printable)

See Table 4-9 on page 175 in the Unicode database character properties for the available categories

Answer 4

In Python 3,

def filter_nonprintable(text):
    import string
    # Get the difference of all ASCII characters from the set of printable characters
    nonprintable = set([chr(i) for i in range(128)]).difference(string.printable)
    # Use translate to remove all non-printable characters
    return text.translate({ord(character):None for character in nonprintable})

See this StackOverflow post on removing punctuation for how .translate() compares to regex & .replace()

Answer 5

This function uses list comprehensions and str.join, so it runs in linear time instead of O(n^2):

from curses.ascii import isprint

def printable(input):
    return ''.join(char for char in input if isprint(char))

Answer 6

The best I've come up with now is (thanks to the python-izers above)

def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join([c for c in str if ord(c) > 31 or ord(c) == 9])

This is the only way I've found out that works with Unicode characters/strings

Any better options?

Answer 7

The one below performs faster than the others above. Take a look

''.join([x if x in string.printable else '' for x in Str])

Answer 8

In Python there's no POSIX regex classes

There are when using the regex library: https://pypi.org/project/regex/

It is well maintained and supports Unicode regex, Posix regex and many more. The usage (method signatures) is very similar to Python's re.

From the documentation:

[[:alpha:]]; [[:^alpha:]]

POSIX character classes are supported. These are normally treated as an alternative form of \p{...}.

(I'm not affiliated, just a user.)

Answer 9

To remove 'whitespace',

import re
t = """
\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>
"""
pat = re.compile(r'[\t\n]')
print(pat.sub("", t))

Answer 10

Yet another option in python 3:

re.sub(f'[^{re.escape(string.printable)}]', '', my_string)

Answer 11

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.