How to Remove Non-Breaking Spaces from Strings in Python?

Removing Non-Breaking Spaces from Strings in Python

When parsing HTML files using Beautiful Soup, you may encounter xa0 Unicode characters representing spaces. This article addresses how to effectively remove these characters in Python 2.7 and convert them into regular spaces.

To resolve this issue, simply replace xa0 with u' ' as follows:

<code class="python">string = string.replace(u'\xa0', u' ')</code>

The xa0 character represents a non-breaking space in Latin1 (ISO 8859-1) encoding. By using u' ' instead of '', you ensure it is replaced with a Unicode space.

When you encounter xc2 characters after using .encode(), it indicates the Unicode has been encoded into UTF-8. xa0 is represented by the two bytes xc2xa0 in UTF-8.

To understand Unicode handling in Python, refer to the documentation at http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html. Note that this answer dates back to 2012; Python has evolved, and you should now consider using unicodedata.normalize for Unicode normalization.

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