Stripping non printable characters from a string in python

Iterating over strings is unfortunately rather slow in Python. Regular expressions are over an order of magnitude faster for this kind of thing. You just have to build the character class yourself. The unicodedata module is quite helpful for this, especially the unicodedata.category() function. See Unicode Character Database for descriptions of the categories.

import unicodedata, re, itertools, sys

all_chars = (chr(i) for i in range(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(chr, itertools.chain(range(0x00,0x20), range(0x7f,0xa0))))

control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))

def remove_control_chars(s):
    return control_char_re.sub('', s)

For Python2

import unicodedata, re, sys

all_chars = (unichr(i) for i in xrange(sys.maxunicode))
categories = {'Cc'}
control_chars = ''.join(c for c in all_chars if unicodedata.category(c) in categories)
# or equivalently and much more efficiently
control_chars = ''.join(map(unichr, range(0x00,0x20) + range(0x7f,0xa0)))

control_char_re = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(control_chars))

def remove_control_chars(s):
    return control_char_re.sub('', s)

For some use-cases, additional categories (e.g. all from the control group might be preferable, although this might slow down the processing time and increase memory usage significantly. Number of characters per category:

• Cc (control): 65
• Cf (format): 161
• Cs (surrogate): 2048
• Co (private-use): 137468
• Cn (unassigned): 836601

Edit Adding suggestions from the comments.

As far as I know, the most pythonic/efficient method would be:

import string

filtered_string = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, myStr)

You could try setting up a filter using the unicodedata.category() function:

import unicodedata
printable = {'Lu', 'Ll'}
def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join(c for c in str if unicodedata.category(c) in printable)

See Table 4-9 on page 175 in the Unicode database character properties for the available categories

The following will work with Unicode input and is rather fast...

import sys

# build a table mapping all non-printable characters to None
NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE = {
    i: None for i in range(0, sys.maxunicode + 1) if not chr(i).isprintable()
}

def make_printable(s):
    """Replace non-printable characters in a string."""

    # the translate method on str removes characters
    # that map to None from the string
    return s.translate(NOPRINT_TRANS_TABLE)


assert make_printable('Café') == 'Café'
assert make_printable('\x00\x11Hello') == 'Hello'
assert make_printable('') == ''

My own testing suggests this approach is faster than functions that iterate over the string and return a result using str.join.

This function uses list comprehensions and str.join, so it runs in linear time instead of O(n^2):

from curses.ascii import isprint

def printable(input):
    return ''.join(char for char in input if isprint(char))

Yet another option in python 3:

re.sub(f'[^{re.escape(string.printable)}]', '', my_string)

Based on @Ber's answer, I suggest removing only control characters as defined in the Unicode character database categories:

import unicodedata
def filter_non_printable(s):
    return ''.join(c for c in s if not unicodedata.category(c).startswith('C'))

The best I've come up with now is (thanks to the python-izers above)

def filter_non_printable(str):
  return ''.join([c for c in str if ord(c) > 31 or ord(c) == 9])

This is the only way I've found out that works with Unicode characters/strings

Any better options?

In Python there's no POSIX regex classes

There are when using the regex library: https://pypi.org/project/regex/

It is well maintained and supports Unicode regex, Posix regex and many more. The usage (method signatures) is very similar to Python's re.

From the documentation:

[[:alpha:]]; [[:^alpha:]]

POSIX character classes are supported. These are normally treated as an alternative form of \p{...}.

(I'm not affiliated, just a user.)

An elegant pythonic solution to stripping 'non printable' characters from a string in python is to use the isprintable() string method together with a generator expression or list comprehension depending on the use case ie. size of the string:

    ''.join(c for c in my_string if c.isprintable())

str.isprintable() Return True if all characters in the string are printable or the string is empty, False otherwise. Nonprintable characters are those characters defined in the Unicode character database as “Other” or “Separator”, excepting the ASCII space (0x20) which is considered printable. (Note that printable characters in this context are those which should not be escaped when repr() is invoked on a string. It has no bearing on the handling of strings written to sys.stdout or sys.stderr.)

The one below performs faster than the others above. Take a look

''.join([x if x in string.printable else '' for x in Str])

Adapted from answers by Ants Aasma and shawnrad:

nonprintable = set(map(chr, list(range(0,32)) + list(range(127,160))))
ord_dict = {ord(character):None for character in nonprintable}
def filter_nonprintable(text):
    return text.translate(ord_dict)

#use
str = "this is my string"
str = filter_nonprintable(str)
print(str)

tested on Python 3.7.7

1. Error description Run the copied and pasted python code report:

Python invalid non-printable character U+00A0

2. The cause of the error The space in the copied code is not the same as the format in Python;

3. Solution Delete the space and re-enter the space. For example, the red part in the above picture is an abnormal space. Delete and re-enter the space to run;

Source : Python invalid non-printable character U+00A0