find and remove "\" character from string

[Steve Holden]

Konstantinos Pachopoulos wrote:
> Hi,
> i have the following string s and the following code, which doesn't 
> successfully remove the "\", but sucessfully removes the "\\".
> 
>  >>> s="Sad\\asd\asd"
>  >>> newS=""
>  >>> for i in s:
> ...     if i!="\\":
> ...             newS=newS+i
> ...
>  >>> newS
> 'Sadasd\x07sd'
> 
In actual fact there was just a single backslash in s to start with. If 
you read the documentation carefully at

   http://docs.python.org/ref/strings.html

(though it's the language reference manual, and therefore not 
necessarily suitable reading for beginners)  you will see that the "\\" 
represents a single backslash character and \a represents an ASCII BEL 
character (whose decimal value is 7, and which the interpreter 
represents as the hexadecimal escape string \x07).

So the characters in s were S a d \ a s d \x07 s d and you shoudl have 
seen len(s) == 10.

As has already been mentioned, the shortest way to do what you want would be

newS = s.replace("\\", "")

> I have also read the following, but i do not understand the "...and the 
> remaining characters have been mapped through the given translation 
> table, which must be a string of length 256". Can some explain?
> 
> *translate*( 	table[, deletechars])
> 
>     Return a copy of the string where all characters occurring in the
>     optional argument deletechars are removed, and the remaining
>     characters have been mapped through the given translation table,
>     which must be a string of length 256.
> 
>     For Unicode objects, the translate() method does not accept the
>     optional deletechars argument. Instead, it returns a copy of the s
>     where all characters have been mapped through the given translation
>     table which must be a mapping of Unicode ordinals to Unicode
>     ordinals, Unicode strings or |None|. Unmapped characters are left
>     untouched. Characters mapped to |None| are deleted. Note, a more
>     flexible approach is to create a custom character mapping codec
>     using the codecs <http://docs.python.org/lib/module-codecs.html>
>     module (see encodings.cp1251 for an example).
> 
The translate() string method uses the numeric represetation of each 
character as an index into the translation table. So a null translation 
table can be constructed using

 >>> t = "".join(chr(i) for i in range(256))
 >>> t
'\x00\x01\x02\x03\x04\x05\x06\x07\x08\t\n\x0b\x0c\r\x0e\x0f\x10\x11\x12\x13\x14\
x15\x16\x17\x18\x19\x1a\x1b\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f 
!"#$%&\'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABC
DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~\x7f\x80\x81\x82\x83
\x84\x85\x86\x87\x88\x89\x8a\x8b\x8c\x8d\x8e\x8f\x90\x91\x92\x93\x94\x95\x96\x97
\x98\x99\x9a\x9b\x9c\x9d\x9e\x9f\xa0\xa1\xa2\xa3\xa4\xa5\xa6\xa7\xa8\xa9\xaa\xab
\xac\xad\xae\xaf\xb0\xb1\xb2\xb3\xb4\xb5\xb6\xb7\xb8\xb9\xba\xbb\xbc\xbd\xbe\xbf
\xc0\xc1\xc2\xc3\xc4\xc5\xc6\xc7\xc8\xc9\xca\xcb\xcc\xcd\xce\xcf\xd0\xd1\xd2\xd3
\xd4\xd5\xd6\xd7\xd8\xd9\xda\xdb\xdc\xdd\xde\xdf\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4\xe5\xe6\xe7
\xe8\xe9\xea\xeb\xec\xed\xee\xef\xf0\xf1\xf2\xf3\xf4\xf5\xf6\xf7\xf8\xf9\xfa\xfb
\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff'
 >>>

(the above output will look a little screwy in the mail because of odd 
line wrapping).

So hopefully you could then achieve the same effect (at vastly greater 
complexity than the first solution) using

 >>> s="Sad\\asd\asd"
 >>> len(s)
10
 >>> newS = s.translate(t, "\\")
 >>> newS
'Sadasd\x07sd'
 >>>

You would probably only want to use that method if you were actually 
translating some of the characters at the same time.

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden        +1 571 484 6266   +1 800 494 3119
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