Stripping ASCII codes when parsing

[Tony Nelson]

In article <mailman.2153.1129538807.509.python-list at python.org>,
 David Pratt <fairwinds at eastlink.ca> wrote:

> I am working with a text format that advises to strip any ascii control 
> characters (0 - 30) as part of parsing data and also the ascii pipe 
> character (124) from the data. I think many of these characters are 
> from a different time. Since I have never seen most of these characters 
> in text I am not sure how these first 30 control characters are all 
> represented (other than say tab (\t), newline(\n), line return(\r) ) so 
> what should I do to remove these characters if they are ever 
> encountered. Many thanks.

Most of those characters are hard to see.

Represent arbitrary characters in a string in hex: "\x00\x01\x02" or 
with chr(n).

If you just want to remove some characters, look into "".translate().  

nullxlate = "".join([chr(n) for n in xrange(256)])
delchars = nullxlate[:31] + chr(124)
outputstr = inputstr.translate(nullxlate, delchars)
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