How to Properly Remove \xa0 Unicode Formatting in Python?

Removing xa0 Unicode Formatting in Python

While parsing HTML with Beautiful Soup, you may encounter the xa0 Unicode character representing spaces. Removing these characters and replacing them with regular spaces requires attention to encoding and decoding.

In Python 2.7, you can use the string.replace(u'xa0', u' ') command to substitute xa0 with spaces. However, this approach erroneously converts xa0 to "u" characters.

The solution lies in understanding that xa0 is a non-breaking space in Latin1 (ISO 8859-1). To remove it, use the following command:

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

However, calling encode('utf-8') on the modified string without using the replace() command can result in strange characters like xc2. This is because encode() converts unicode characters to UTF-8, representing xa0 as a sequence of two bytes, xc2 and xa0.

To restore the string to its intended state, use the following command after the replace() operation:

string = string.encode('utf-8')

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