[python] Stripping non printable characters from a string in python

I use to run

$s =~ s/[^[:print:]]//g;

on Perl to get rid of non printable characters.

In Python there's no POSIX regex classes, and I can't write [:print:] having it mean what I want. I know of no way in Python to detect if a character is printable or not.

What would you do?

EDIT: It has to support Unicode characters as well. The string.printable way will happily strip them out of the output. curses.ascii.isprint will return false for any unicode character.

As far as I know, the most pythonic/efficient method would be:

import string

filtered_string = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, myStr)

You could try setting up a filter using the unicodedata.category() function:

import unicodedata
printable = {'Lu', 'Ll'}
def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join(c for c in str if unicodedata.category(c) in printable)

See Table 4-9 on page 175 in the Unicode database character properties for the available categories

In Python 3,

def filter_nonprintable(text):
    import itertools
    # Use characters of control category
    nonprintable = itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20),range(0x7f,0xa0))
    # Use translate to remove all non-printable characters
    return text.translate({character:None for character in nonprintable})

See this StackOverflow post on removing punctuation for how .translate() compares to regex & .replace()

The ranges can be generated via nonprintable = (ord(c) for c in (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode)) if unicodedata.category(c)=='Cc') using the Unicode character database categories as shown by @Ants Aasma.

The following will work with Unicode input and is rather fast...

import sys

# build a table mapping all non-printable characters to None
NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE = {
    i: None for i in range(0, sys.maxunicode + 1) if not chr(i).isprintable()
}

def make_printable(s):
    """Replace non-printable characters in a string."""

    # the translate method on str removes characters
    # that map to None from the string
    return s.translate(NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE)


assert make_printable('Café') == 'Café'
assert make_printable('\x00\x11Hello') == 'Hello'
assert make_printable('') == ''

My own testing suggests this approach is faster than functions that iterate over the string and return a result using str.join.

Yet another option in python 3:

re.sub(f'[^{re.escape(string.printable)}]', '', my_string)

This function uses list comprehensions and str.join, so it runs in linear time instead of O(n^2):

from curses.ascii import isprint

def printable(input):
    return ''.join(char for char in input if isprint(char))

The best I've come up with now is (thanks to the python-izers above)

def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join([c for c in str if ord(c) > 31 or ord(c) == 9])

This is the only way I've found out that works with Unicode characters/strings

Any better options?

The one below performs faster than the others above. Take a look

''.join([x if x in string.printable else '' for x in Str])

In Python there's no POSIX regex classes

There are when using the regex library: https://pypi.org/project/regex/

It is well maintained and supports Unicode regex, Posix regex and many more. The usage (method signatures) is very similar to Python's re.

From the documentation:

[[:alpha:]]; [[:^alpha:]]

POSIX character classes are supported. These are normally treated as an alternative form of \p{...}.

(I'm not affiliated, just a user.)

Based on @Ber's answer, I suggest removing only control characters as defined in the Unicode character database categories:

import unicodedata
def filter_non_printable(s):
    return ''.join(c for c in s if not unicodedata.category(c).startswith('C'))

Adapted from answers by Ants Aasma and shawnrad:

nonprintable = set(map(chr, list(range(0,32)) + list(range(127,160))))
ord_dict = {ord(character):None for character in nonprintable}
def filter_nonprintable(text):
    return text.translate(ord_dict)

#use
str = "this is my string"
str = filter_nonprintable(str)
print(str)

tested on Python 3.7.7

To remove 'whitespace',

import re
t = """
\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>&nbsp;</p>\n\t<p>
"""
pat = re.compile(r'[\t\n]')
print(pat.sub("", t))