How to Remove Unicode Formatting Characters in Python?

Unicode Formatting Removal in Python

In Python, removing specific Unicode formatting characters like xa0 can be accomplished using string manipulation methods.

Removing xa0 from Strings

To remove non-breaking spaces (xa0) from a string in Python 2.7, you can use the following code:

string = string.replace(u'\xa0', u' ')

This replaces every occurrence of xa0 with a regular space character.

Character Encoding Considerations

Note that xa0 is represented in Latin1 (ISO 8859-1) as chr(160). When using .encode('utf-8'), it encodes the string into UTF-8 format, representing xa0 as the two-byte sequence xc2xa0.

Generalized Unicode Removal

To remove other Unicode formatting characters, consider using the unicodedata.normalize function. It normalizes Unicode strings based on the provided normalization form. For example, to remove most diacritics (accent marks):

import unicodedata
normalized_string = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', string)

Remember, Unicode formatting removal depends on the specific character set used in your data. It's recommended to understand the encoding and character representation before performing any removal operations.

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