pythonstringpython-2.7unicode

Python Removing Non Latin Characters

How can I delete all the non latin characters from a string? More specifically, is there a way to find out Non Latin characters from unicode data?

Solution

  • Using the third-party regex module, you could remove all non-Latin characters with

    import regex
result = regex.sub(ur'[^\p{Latin}]', u'', text)

    If you don't want to use the regex module, this page lists Latin unicode blocks:

    \p{InBasic_Latin}: U+0000–U+007F
\p{InLatin-1_Supplement}: U+0080–U+00FF
\p{InLatin_Extended-A}: U+0100–U+017F
\p{InLatin_Extended-B}: U+0180–U+024F
\p{InLatin_Extended_Additional}: U+1E00–U+1EFF

    So you could use these to form a character class using Python's builtin re module:

    import re
result = re.sub(ur'[^\x00-\x7F\x80-\xFF\u0100-\u017F\u0180-\u024F\u1E00-\u1EFF]', u'', text)

    Demo:

    In [24]: import re
In [25]: import regex

In [35]: text = u'aweerwq\u0645\u0631\u062d\u0628\u0627\u043c\u0438\u0440'

In [36]: print(text)
aweerwqمرحباмир

In [37]: regex.sub(ur'[^\p{Latin}]', u'', text)
Out[37]: u'aweerwq'

In [38]: re.sub(ur'[^\x00-\x7F\x80-\xFF\u0100-\u017F\u0180-\u024F\u1E00-\u1EFF]', u'', text)    
Out[38]: u'aweerwq'