Replace any character outside of the English alphabet in Python?

Question

How can I replace any character outside of the English alphabet?

For example, 'abcdükl*m' replaced with a ' ' would be 'abcd kl m'

Answer 1

Use the regex [^a-zA-Z]:

re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z]', '', mystring)

Some info: the a-zA-Z are character ranges that indicate all the lowercase and uppercase letter, respectively, and the caret ^ at the beginning of the character class indicates negation, e.g. "anything except these".

Answer 2

Assuming you're trying to normalize text, see my link under "Comprehensive character replacement module in python for non-unicode and non-ascii for HTML".

unicodedata has a normalize method that can gracefully degrade text for you:

import unicodedata
def gracefully_degrade_to_ascii( text ):
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFKD',text).encode('ascii','ignore')

Full Docs - http://docs.python.org/library/unicodedata.html

If you're trying to just strip out non-ASCII chars, the negated character set regex that others mentioned is the way to do it.

Answer 3

Search for [^a-zA-Z] and replace with ' '

Answer 4

>>> import string
>>> print ''.join(x if x in string.ascii_letters else ' ' for x in u'abcdükl*m') 
abcd kl m