Fast way to filter illegal xml unicode chars in python?

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The XML specification lists a bunch of Unicode characters that are either illegal or "discouraged". Given a string, how can I remove all illegal characters from it?

I came up with the following regular expression, but it's a bit of a mouthful.

illegal_xml_re = re.compile(u'[\x00-\x08\x0b-\x1f\x7f-\x84\x86-\x9f\ud800-\udfff\ufdd0-\ufddf\ufffe-\uffff]')
clean = illegal_xml_re.sub('', dirty)

(Python 2.5 doesn't know about Unicode chars above 0xFFFF, so no need to filter those.)

unicode xml python
3 Answers

Here's an updated version of Olemis Lang's answer for Python 3:

import re
import sys

illegal_unichrs = [(0x00, 0x08), (0x0B, 0x0C), (0x0E, 0x1F),
                   (0x7F, 0x84), (0x86, 0x9F),
                   (0xFDD0, 0xFDDF), (0xFFFE, 0xFFFF)]
if sys.maxunicode >= 0x10000:  # not narrow build
    illegal_unichrs.extend([(0x1FFFE, 0x1FFFF), (0x2FFFE, 0x2FFFF),
                            (0x3FFFE, 0x3FFFF), (0x4FFFE, 0x4FFFF),
                            (0x5FFFE, 0x5FFFF), (0x6FFFE, 0x6FFFF),
                            (0x7FFFE, 0x7FFFF), (0x8FFFE, 0x8FFFF),
                            (0x9FFFE, 0x9FFFF), (0xAFFFE, 0xAFFFF),
                            (0xBFFFE, 0xBFFFF), (0xCFFFE, 0xCFFFF),
                            (0xDFFFE, 0xDFFFF), (0xEFFFE, 0xEFFFF),
                            (0xFFFFE, 0xFFFFF), (0x10FFFE, 0x10FFFF)])

illegal_ranges = [fr'{chr(low)}-{chr(high)}' for (low, high) in illegal_unichrs]
xml_illegal_character_regex = '[' + ''.join(illegal_ranges) + ']'
illegal_xml_chars_re = re.compile(xml_illegal_character_regex)
# filtered_string = illegal_xml_chars_re.sub('', original_string)
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