Replace non-ASCII characters with a single space

Question

I need to replace all non-ASCII (\\x00-\\x7F) characters with a space. I\'m surprised that this is not dead-easy in Python, unless I\'m missing something. The following func

Answer 1

Your ''.join() expression is filtering, removing anything non-ASCII; you could use a conditional expression instead:

return ''.join([i if ord(i) < 128 else ' ' for i in text])

This handles characters one by one and would still use one space per character replaced.

Your regular expression should just replace consecutive non-ASCII characters with a space:

re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+',' ', text)

Note the + there.