Remove all hex characters from string in Python

Question

Although there are similar questions, I can't seem to find a working solution for my case:

I'm encountering some annoying hex chars in strings, e.g.

'\xe2\x80\x9chttp://www.google.com\xe2\x80\x9d blah blah#%#@$^blah'

What I need is to remove these hex \xHH characters, and them alone, in order to get the following result:

'http://www.google.com blah blah#%#@$^blah'

decoding doesn't help:

s.decode('utf8') # u'\u201chttp://www.google.com\u201d blah blah#%#@$^blah'

How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

Just remove all non-ASCII characters:

>>> s.decode('utf8').encode('ascii', errors='ignore')
'http://www.google.com blah blah#%#@$^blah'

Other possible solution:

>>> import string
>>> s = '\xe2\x80\x9chttp://www.google.com\xe2\x80\x9d blah blah#%#@$^blah'
>>> printable = set(string.printable)
>>> filter(lambda x: x in printable, s)
'http://www.google.com blah blah#%#@$^blah'

Or use Regular expressions:

>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7f]',r'', s) 
'http://www.google.com blah blah#%#@$^blah'

Pick your favorite one.