How to Replace Non-ASCII Characters with Spaces in Python?

Replacing Non-ASCII Characters with Spaces in Python

The task of replacing non-ASCII characters with spaces in Python may seem straightforward, but the built-in functions often used for character manipulation may not immediately provide a simple solution. Let's explore the challenges and alternative approaches to achieve this goal effectively.

Current Solutions

Two existing approaches are presented in the question:

• remove_non_ascii_1() removes all non-ASCII characters.
• remove_non_ascii_2() replaces non-ASCII characters with spaces, using multiple spaces for characters with larger code points.

Single-Space Replacement

The question asks specifically for replacing all non-ASCII characters with a single space. To achieve this, we need to modify the remove_non_ascii_1() function:

<code class="python">def remove_non_ascii_1(text):
    return ''.join([i if ord(i) < 128 else ' ' for i in text])</code>

In this updated function, we use a conditional expression to replace non-ASCII characters with a single space. The ''.join() expression then concatenates the modified characters into a single string.

Regular Expression Approach

The regular expression in remove_non_ascii_2() can also be adjusted for single-space replacement:

<code class="python">re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+', ' ', text)</code>

Here, the ' ' modifier is added within the square brackets to ensure that consecutive non-ASCII characters are replaced with a single space.

Note: These functions operate on Unicode strings. If working with byte strings, the Unicode characters must first be decoded (e.g., as unicode(text, 'utf-8').

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