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I have a string where some of the characters appear as unicode, e.g.: "bla bla bla \uf604 bla bla bla"

I tried doing string = string.replace("\uf604", "X"), but nothing happens. I tried to decode the string to utf-8, but apparently that doesn't work in Python 3.

How can I replace the character?

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  • "tried to decode the string to utf-8"...? Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 22:51
  • like in this question stackoverflow.com/questions/13093727/… Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 22:57
  • Ah, from utf-8. There's a lot of confusion about encoding unicode/decoding bytes stemming from Py2. Could you add to your question a bit more details about what and how you've tried? If you get tracebacks, add them too. Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 23:01
  • 1
    Cannot replicate with Python 3 – that is, the replacement works. Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 23:13
  • line.decode("utf-8").replace(u"\u201c", "X").encode("utf-8") AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode' Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 23:35

1 Answer 1

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In Python 3, this works (although the print may not, depending on your terminal):

>>> s="bla bla bla \uf604 bla bla bla"
>>> print(s)
bla bla bla  bla bla bla
>>> s="bla bla bla \uf604 bla bla bla"
>>> s.replace('\uf604','X')
'bla bla bla X bla bla bla'

But perhaps you have a literal slash and not an escape code. Note the print difference:

>>> s="bla bla bla \\uf604 bla bla bla"
>>> print(s)
bla bla bla \uf604 bla bla bla
>>> s.replace('\uf604','X')
'bla bla bla \\uf604 bla bla bla'

Use a escape slash to fix:

>>> s.replace('\\uf604','X')
'bla bla bla X bla bla bla'
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1 Comment

That's only one, but not very generic if a string contain many unicode char

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