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pythonunicodeencodinglatin1

Cannot split a seemingly encoded string

While parsing data from a web request, I came across the following string -

dateRange = 'September\xa04,\xa01978 – September 1980'

The encoding of the extracted string seems to be Latin-1 (based on \xa0). I got rid of that by replacing the codes with spaces.

dateRange = dateRange.replace(u'\xa0', u' ')

Keeping that aside, I can't split the string on the hyphen(-).

When I call split() as follows:

print(dateRange.split('-'))

The output is as follows:

['September\xa04,\xa01978 – September 1980']

It is as if there was no hyphen in the string. I sense that it has something to do with the encoding, but I can't seem to comprehend the issue exactly.

So, how to work around this issue?

EDIT:

I have already tried the following to no avail:

dateRange.split('\-')
Solution

  • That's not an hyphen. That's an U+2013 ᴇɴ ᴅᴀsʜ.

    Just copy & paste it into your split call:

    dateRange.split('–')

    Alternatively, you can replace it with an actual hyphen. Make sure to copy & paste the en dash into the replace call :)