How to Remove Non-ASCII Characters while Preserving Periods and Spaces?

Removing Non-ASCII Characters while Preserving Periods and Spaces

The goal is to process textual data stored in a .txt file and extract a string without any non-ASCII characters, while preserving both spaces and periods. To achieve this, the provided code defines a function onlyascii() that determines if a character should be included by checking its ASCII value. However, it currently also removes periods and spaces.

To modify onlyascii() to exempt periods and spaces, we can leverage Python's string.printable module. string.printable contains a set of characters considered printable, including spaces and periods.

The updated definition of onlyascii() utilizing string.printable would be:

def onlyascii(char):
    if ord(char) < 48 or ord(char) > 127 or char not in string.printable:
        return ''
    else:
        return char

By incorporating this check into onlyascii(), characters that are not printable, excluding spaces and periods, will be filtered out.

Here is the corrected code with the updated onlyascii() function:

def onlyascii(char):
    if ord(char) < 48 or ord(char) > 127 or char not in string.printable:
        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

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