I have these weird <200b></200b>
signs in my strings. What is it and how can I remove it? It seems to just be whitespace
You appreciate traditional values ​​and expect respect
​​
is how it displays when I look at it in console.
If you want to remove it, you can normalize it with unicodedata
...
>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'Goodbye​​Garbage').encode('ascii',
'ignore')
'GoodbyeGarbage'
>>>
Note that this simply returns a ASCII string, and you don't have unicode after using this technique.
Another option that only works with the example you provided...
>>> u'Goodbye​​Garbage'.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'GoodbyeGarbage'
>>>
Adding unicodedata
gives you more flexibility to deal with strange cases and decompose them to real ASCII, but a raw .encode('ascii', 'ignore')
will strip out all unicode characters without trying to normalize them first.