Replace special characters in python

Question

I have some text coming from the web as such:

£6.49

Obviously I would like this to be displayed as:

£6.49

I have tried the following so far:

s = url['title']
s = s.encode('utf8')
s = s.replace(u'Â','')

And a few variants on this (after finding it on this very same forum)

But still no luck as I keep getting:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 100: ordinal not in range(128)

Could anyone help me getting this right?

UPDATE:

Adding the repr examples and content type

u'Star Trek XI £3.99'
u'Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set \xc2\xa36.49'
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If, s=url['title'] makes s equal to this:

In [48]: s=u'Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set \xc2\xa36.49'

Then the problem is

1. in the code that defines url,
2. or else the content from the web is mal-formed.

If Case 1, we'd need to see the code that defines url.

If Case 2, a quick-and-dirty workaround would be to encode the unicode object s with the raw-unicode-escape codec:

In [49]: print(s)
Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set £6.49

In [50]: print(s.encode('raw-unicode-escape'))
Oscar Winners Best Pictures Box Set £6.49

See also this SO question.

---

Regarding titles like s=u'Star Trek XI £3.99': Again, it would be nice fix the problem before it gets to this stage -- perhaps by looking at how url is defined. But assuming the content from the web is mal-formed, a workaround would be:

In [86]: import re

In [87]: print(re.sub(r'&#x([a-fA-F\d]+);',lambda m: unichr(int(m.group(1),base=16)),s))
Star Trek XI £3.99

---

A little bit of explanation:

Note that

In [51]: x=u'£'
In [53]: x.encode('utf-8')
Out[53]: '\xc2\xa3'

So the unicode object u'£', encoded with the utf-8 codec, becomes the string object '\xc2\xa3'.

Somehow, url['title'] is getting defined to be the unicode object u'\xc2\xa3'. (The u makes a big difference!)

Thus we have u'\xc2\xa3' when we desire '\xc2\xa3'. Encoding the unicode object u'\xc2\xa3' with the raw-unicode-escape codec transforms it to '\xc2\xa3'.