Removing unwanted characters from a string in Python

Question

I have some strings that I want to delete some unwanted characters from them. For example: Adam\'sApple ----> AdamsApple.(case insensitive) Can someone help

Answer 1

As has been pointed out several times now, you have to either use replace or regular expressions (most likely you don't need regexes though), but if you also have to make sure that the resulting string is plain ASCII (doesn't contain funky characters like é, ò, µ, æ or φ), you could finally do

>>> u'(like é, ò, µ, æ or φ)'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'(like , , ,  or )'

Answer 2

An alternative that will take in a string and an array of unwanted chars

    # function that removes unwanted signs from str
    #Pass the string to the function and an array ofunwanted chars

def removeSigns(str,arrayOfChars):

    charFound = False

    newstr = ""

    for letter in str:
        for char in arrayOfChars:
            if letter == char:
                charFound = True
                break
        if charFound == False:
            newstr += letter
        charFound = False

    return newstr

Answer 3

Here is a function that removes all the irritating ascii characters, the only exception is "&" which is replaced with "and". I use it to police a filesystem and ensure that all of the files adhere to the file naming scheme I insist everyone uses.

def cleanString(incomingString):
    newstring = incomingString
    newstring = newstring.replace("!","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("@","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("#","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("$","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("%","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("^","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("&","and")
    newstring = newstring.replace("*","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("(","")
    newstring = newstring.replace(")","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("+","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("=","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("?","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("\'","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("\"","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("{","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("}","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("[","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("]","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("<","")
    newstring = newstring.replace(">","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("~","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("`","")
    newstring = newstring.replace(":","")
    newstring = newstring.replace(";","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("|","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("\\","")
    newstring = newstring.replace("/","")        
    return newstring

Answer 4

str.replace("'","");

Answer 5

I am probably late for the answer but i think below code would also do ( to an extreme end) it will remove all the unncesary chars:

a = '; niraj kale 984wywn on 2/2/2017'
a= re.sub('[^a-zA-Z0-9.?]',' ',a)
a = a.replace('  ',' ').lstrip().rstrip()

which will give

'niraj kale 984wywn on 2 2 2017'

Answer 6

One simple way:

>>> s = "Adam'sApple"
>>> x = s.replace("'", "")
>>> print x
'AdamsApple'

... or take a look at regex substitutions.