replace special characters in a string python

Question

I am using urllib to get a string of html from a website and need to put each word in the html document into a list   Here is the code I have so far  I keep getting an error  I have also copied the error below   import urllib request  url   input  Please enter a URL      z urllib request urlopen url  z str z read    removeSpecialChars   str replace         amp              lt  gt      -            words   removeSpecialChars split    print   Words list     words 0 20     Here is the error   Please enter a URL  http   simleyfootball com Traceback  most recent call last     File  C  Users jeremy KLUG My Documents LiClipse Workspace Python Project 2 Module2 py   line 7  in  lt module gt      removeSpecialChars   str replace         amp              lt  gt      -           TypeError  replace   takes at least 2 arguments  1 given

User · Answer

You need to call replace on z and not on str  since you want to replace characters located in the string variable z  removeSpecialChars   z replace         amp              lt  gt      -             But this will not work  as replace looks for a substring  you will most likely need to use regular expression module re with the sub function   import re removeSpecialChars   re sub          amp              lt  gt      -            z    Don t forget the     which indicates that this is a set of characters to be replaced

User · Answer

replace operates on a specific string  so you need to call it like this  removeSpecialChars   z replace         amp              lt  gt      -             but this is probably not what you need  since this will look for a single string containing all that characters in the same order  you can do it with a regexp  as Danny Michaud pointed out   as a side note  you might want to look for BeautifulSoup  which is a library for parsing messy HTML formatted text like what you usually get from scaping websites

User · Answer

str replace is the wrong function for what you want to do  apart from it being used incorrectly   You want to replace any character of a set with a space  not the whole set with a single space  the latter is what replace does   You can use translate like this   removeSpecialChars   z translate   ord c       for c in         amp              lt  gt      -         This creates a mapping which maps every character in your list of special characters to a space  then calls translate   on the string  replacing every single character in the set of special characters with a space

User · Answer

You can replace the special characters with the desired characters as follows   import string specialCharacterText    H y   w  re  amp      inCharSet           amp              lt  gt      -       outCharSet                                      corresponding characters in inCharSet to be replaced splCharReplaceList   string maketrans inCharSet  outCharSet  splCharFreeString   specialCharacterText translate splCharReplaceList

User · Answer

One way is to use re sub  that s my preferred way   import re my str    hey th  ere  my new string   re sub    a-zA-Z0-9  n          my str  print my new string   Output   hey there   Another way is to use re escape   import string import re  my str    hey th  ere   chars   re escape string punctuation  print re sub r    chars         my str    Output   hey there   Just a small tip about parameters style in python by PEP-8 parameters should be remove special chars and not removeSpecialChars  Also if you want to keep the spaces just change   a-zA-Z0-9  n    to   a-zA-Z0-9 n

[python] replace special characters in a string python

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