Help me on Backspace please

[John Machin]

On Jun 27, 6:32 am, cak... at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi
> I am a beginner on Python and have a problem..
>
> I have text file and reading it line by line and there are backspace
> characters in it like '\b' or anything you want like "#".  I want to
> replace these chars. with Backspace action. I mean deleting the
> previous char. and the \b char also. and writing all cleaned text to a
> file again.
>
> How can I do that.
>

I haven't seen anything like that for ... ummm, a very long time. Used
for bolding and making up your own characters on a daisy-wheel
printer. Where did you get the file from?

If there are no cases of multiple adjacent backspaces (e.g. "blahfoo\b
\b\bblah") you can do:
   new_line = re.sub(r'.\x08', old_line, '')

Note: using \x08 for backspace instead of \b to avoid having to worry
about how many \ to use in the regex :-)

Otherwise you would need to do something like
   while True:
      new_line = re.sub(r'[^\x08]\x08', '', old_line)
      if new_line == old_line: break
      old_line = new_line

And if you were paranoid, you might test for any remaining stray
backspaces, just in case the line contains "illegal" things like
"\bfoo" or "foo\b\b\b\b" etc.

Cheers,
John