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Remove "characters with encodings larger than 3 bytes" using Python 3

I want to remove characters with encodings larger than 3 bytes. Because when I upload my CSV data to Amazon Mechanical Turk system, it asks me to do it.

Your CSV file needs to be UTF-8 encoded and cannot contain characters with encodings larger than 3 bytes. For example, some non-English characters are not allowed (learn more).

To overcome this problem, I want to make a filter_max3bytes funciton to remove those characters in Python3.

x = 'below ð\x9f~\x83,'
y = remove_max3byes(x)  # y=="below ~,"

Then I will apply the function before saving it to a CSV file, which is UTF-8 encoded.

This post is related my problem, but they uses python 2 and the solution did not worked for me.

Thank you!

like image 704
ywat Avatar asked Oct 16 '25 14:10

ywat


1 Answers

None of the characters in your string seems to take 3 bytes in UTF-8:

x = 'below ð\x9f~\x83,'

Anyway, the way to remove them, if there were any would be:

filtered_x = ''.join(char for char in x if len(char.encode('utf-8')) < 3)

For example (with such characters):

>>> x = 'abcd漢字efg'
>>> ''.join(char for char in x if len(char.encode('utf-8')) < 3)
'abcdefg'

BTW, you can verify that your original string does not have 3-byte encodings by doing the following:

>>> for char in 'below ð\x9f~\x83,':
...     print(char, [hex(b) for b in char.encode('utf-8')])
...
b ['0x62']
e ['0x65']
l ['0x6c']
o ['0x6f']
w ['0x77']
  ['0x20']
ð ['0xc3', '0xb0']
  ['0xc2', '0x9f']
~ ['0x7e']
  ['0xc2', '0x83']
, ['0x2c']

EDIT: A wild guess

I believe the OP asks the wrong question and the question is in fact whether the character is printable. I'll assume anything Python displays as \x<number> is not printable, so this solution should work:

x = 'below ð\x9f~\x83,'
filtered_x = ''.join(char for char in x if not repr(char).startswith("'\\x"))

Result:

'below ð~,'
like image 82
zvone Avatar answered Oct 19 '25 04:10

zvone



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