How to work with unicode in Python

Question

I am trying to clean all of the HTML out of a string so the final output is a text file. I have some some research on the various \'converters\' and am starting to lean tow

Answer 1

s=unicodestring.replace('\xa0','')

..is trying to create the unicode character \xa0, which is not valid in an ASCII sctring (the default string type in Python until version 3.x)

The reason r'\xa0' did not error is because in a raw string, escape sequences have no effect. Rather than trying to encode \xa0 into the unicode character, it saw the string as a "literal backslash", "literal x" and so on..

The following are the same:

>>> r'\xa0'
'\\xa0'
>>> '\\xa0'
'\\xa0'

This is something resolved in Python v3, as the default string type is unicode, so you can just do..

>>> '\xa0'
'\xa0'

I am trying to clean all of the HTML out of a string so the final output is a text file

I would strongly recommend BeautifulSoup for this. Writing an HTML cleaning tool is difficult (given how horrible most HTML is), and BeautifulSoup does a great job at both parsing HTML, and dealing with Unicode..

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup("
Hi
")
>>> print soup.prettify()

 
  

   Hi