How to Preserve Spaces and Periods While Removing Non-ASCII Characters in Python Text Files?

Handling Non-ASCII Characters, Preserving Spaces and Periods

When dealing with text files, it's often necessary to remove non-ASCII characters while preserving specific entities like spaces and periods. The provided Python code successfully filters out non-ASCII characters but inadvertently strips spaces and periods as well.

To address this issue, we need to modify the onlyascii() function to explicitly exclude spaces and periods from the filtering process. Here's an updated version:

<code class="python">def onlyascii(char):
    if char == ' ' or char == '.':
        return char
    elif ord(char) < 48 or ord(char) > 127:
        return ''
    else:
        return char</code>

In this revised onlyascii() function, we check if the character is a space (' ') or a period ('.') and return it if so. This modification ensures that these entities are retained in the filtered string.

To utilize the updated onlyascii() function, we can modify the get_my_string() function to filter characters using this function:

<code class="python">def get_my_string(file_path):
    f = open(file_path, 'r')
    data = f.read()
    f.close()
    filtered_data = filter(onlyascii, data)
    filtered_data = filtered_data.lower()
    return ''.join(filtered_data)</code>

The join() method is used to concatenate the characters from the iterable returned by the filter() function, resulting in a string.

By implementing these modifications, you can remove non-ASCII characters while preserving spaces and periods in your text string, catering to your specific project requirements.

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