Python: Remove non ascii characters from csv

Question

I have a csv file only 4 out of 4000 records has some non-ASCII chars. For example

['com.manager', '2016012300', '16.1.23', 'en', 'kinzie', '2015-04-11T17:36:23Z', '1428773783781', '2016-03-11T09:53:45Z', 'df', '5', "\xa5\x06`'", '\xc0\x03"', '\xa2{\xac ===]\xa9}\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7\xf7>', '', '', '', 'https://play.google.com/apps/publish?account=sd#ReviewDetailsPlace:p=com.manager&reviewid=gp:AOqpTOEcQQGmjFcd-bFfU372DTrxh']

I am using following python code to read the csv

with open('/Users/duttaam/Downloads/test1.csv', 'rU') as csvfile:
    reader_obj = csv.reader(x.replace('\0', '') for x in csvfile)
    rownum=0
    for row in reader_obj:
        rownum += 1
        if len(row) != 16:
            print rownum
            print row 

For four rows the reader is showing inconsistent column numbers. But when I counted the delimiters (,) in those rows it shows fine. Only issue I could see is non ascii chars as the example row shown in the above row. I am guessing those are some emojis converted into some chars.

I came up with a function to remove non-printable chars from string how do I apply this to the entire csv?(Thanks to following post:Stripping non printable characters from a string in python)

def removeSpecialcahr(s):
        printable = set(string.printable)
        return filter(lambda x: x in printable, s)

Is there a way to process the csv and remove all non-printable and/or non-ascii characters?

Answer 1

To drop non-ASCII characters from your file, replace your open call with codecs.open(). You could also define your own error handler...:

import codecs
codecs.open('file.csv', 'r', encoding='ascii', errors='ignore')