Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

Question

I need to replace all non-ASCII (\\x00-\\x7F) characters with a space. I\'m surprised that this is not dead-easy in Python, unless I\'m missing something. The following func

Answer 1

For character processing, use Unicode strings:

PythonWin 3.3.0 (v3.3.0:bd8afb90ebf2, Sep 29 2012, 10:57:17) [MSC v.1600 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32.
>>> s='ABC马克def'
>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s)   # Each char is a Unicode codepoint.
'ABC  def'
>>> b = s.encode('utf8')
>>> re.sub(rb'[^\x00-\x7f]',rb' ',b) # Each char is a 3-byte UTF-8 sequence.
b'ABC      def'

But note you will still have a problem if your string contains decomposed Unicode characters (separate character and combining accent marks, for example):

>>> s = 'mañana'
>>> len(s)
6
>>> import unicodedata as ud
>>> n=ud.normalize('NFD',s)
>>> n
'mañana'
>>> len(n)
7
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',s) # single codepoint
'ma ana'
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r' ',n) # only combining mark replaced
'man ana'