I'm working with a .txt file. I want a string of the text from the file with no non-ASCII characters. However, I want to leave spaces and periods. At present, I'm stripping those too. Here's the code:
def onlyascii(char):
if ord(char) < 48 or ord(char) > 127: return ''
else: return char
def get_my_string(file_path):
f=open(file_path,'r')
data=f.read()
f.close()
filtered_data=filter(onlyascii, data)
filtered_data = filtered_data.lower()
return filtered_data
How should I modify onlyascii() to leave spaces and periods? I imagine it's not too complicated but I can't figure it out.
You can filter all characters from the string that are not printable using string.printable, like this:
>>> s = "some\x00string. with\x15 funny characters"
>>> import string
>>> printable = set(string.printable)
>>> filter(lambda x: x in printable, s)
'somestring. with funny characters'
string.printable on my machine contains:
0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c
EDIT: On Python 3, filter will return an iterable. The correct way to obtain a string back would be:
''.join(filter(lambda x: x in printable, s))