I have a string in Python like this:
u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'
How can i remove the
\u200c
part from the string ?
6 Answers
You can encode it into ascii and ignore errors:
u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
Output:
'Health & Fitness'
1 Comment
Martin Massera
This obviously works in the above example but you are forcing the string into ascii losing all unicode chars, which obviously is not a solution that works for all
If you have a string that contains Unicode character, like
s = "Airports Council International \u2013 North America"
then you can try:
newString = (s.encode('ascii', 'ignore')).decode("utf-8")
and the output will be:
Airports Council International North America
3 Comments
Vaibhav Vishal
shouldn't we decode 'ascii' after encoding to ascii
timothyjgraham
If you have a list of strings, you can adapt this as a list comprehension:
list_text_fixed = [(s.encode('ascii', 'ignore')).decode("utf-8") for s in list_text]Martin Massera
This is a bad solution, it will remove ALL unicode characters, not just zero width space.
I just use replace because I don't need it:
varstring.replace('\u200c', '')
Or in your case:
u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'.replace('\u200c', '')
3 Comments
Chet
This is actually better than the accepted answer in most strings. The \u200c is a zero width non joiner, which is an unusual whitespace-type character that
strip() ignores. In most cases with unicode strs you do not want to encode(ascii, ignore).
prosti
This is general solution since ascii may remove some other Unicode characters as well.
user3768258
appreciate this!
for me the following worked
mystring.encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('unicode_escape')
3 Comments
RyanZim
You could improve your answer by explaining why this code works, and what you're doing here. That way, others can be educated.
chujudzvin
tbh, that was a 'Frankenstein' version of all answers that I had previously found but which didn't work. I can't really explain why this one worked over the rest of solutions in my case..
Martin Massera
This is a bad solution, it will remove ALL unicode characters, not just zero width space.
In the specific case in the question: that the string is prefixed with a single u'\200c' character, the solution is as simple as taking a slice that does not include the first character.
original = u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'
fixed = original[1:]
If the leading character may or may not be present, str.lstrip may be used
original = u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'
fixed = original.lstrip(u'\u200c')
The same solutions will work in Python3. From Python 3.9, str.removeprefix is also available
original = u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'
fixed = original.removeprefix(u'\u200c')
Comments
If the Text is just English, this way
u'\u200cHealth & Fitness'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
BUT if such as Arabic, Persian ,... this way:
s=s.replace('\\', '').replace('u200c', '')
If you're going to write a Text file:
import codecs
with codecs.open('text_file.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as text_file:
for line in array_string:
text_file.write('\u200c' + line + '\n')
s.encode('utf-8')\xe2\x80\x8cHealth & Fitnessasciias Arount answered below