What is a neat way to remove different characters from a string? For example, I have the following strings that I need to convert to integers:
($12,990)
$21,434
I use the following code which works fine, but is there a less bulkier way to do the same?
string = string.replace(",", "")
string = string.replace("$", "")
string = string.replace("(", "-")
string = string.replace(")", "")
int(string)
Edit: I am using Python 2.7.
You could use str.translate, e.g.
>>> "($12,990)".translate(str.maketrans({',': '', '$': '', '(': '-', ')': ''}))
'-12990'
As stated by @AdamSmith in the comments you could also utilize the (full) three-argument form of str.maketrans:
>>> translationtable = str.maketrans("(", "-", ",$)")
>>> "($12,990)".translate(translationtable)
'-12990'
In case you're using python-2.x the str.translate function and string.maketrans function can be used:
>>> import string
>>> translationtable = string.maketrans('(', '-')
>>> "($12,990)".translate(translationtable, ',$)')
'-12990'
or with unicodes on Python-2.x you need a unicode-ordinal to unicode-ordinal/string or None:
>>> unicode_translation_table = {ord(u','): None, ord(u'$'): None, ord(u'('): ord(u'-'), ord(u')'): None}
>>> u"($12,990)".translate(unicode_translation_table)
u'-12990'
str.maketrans("(", "-", ",$)") per the docs the three-argument version of maketrans pairs the first two arguments and maps the third to None (empty string)
AttributeError: type object 'str' has no attribute 'maketrans'. I guess that is because I am using Python 2.7. Is there a way to make it work in Python 2.7?
translate() takes exactly one argument (2 given) when I use your solution in Python 2.7 and use a string variable instead of "($12,990)".string.encode('utf-8'), it works. Is there a way to do it using unicode?Well, you can rely on a loop to make it less ugly:
FORBIDDEN_CHARS = { # Model: { "Replacer" : "Replacees", ... }
"" : ",$)",
"-" : "("
}
for replacer in FORBIDDEN_CHARS:
for replacee in FORBIDDEN_CHARS[replacer]:
mystr = mystr.replace(replacee, replacer)
''.join(string.strip('(').strip(')').strip('$').split(','))
or
''.join(filter(str.isdigit, string))
string.replace("(", "-")a typo? That line doesn't remove a character...-were both a value to be replaced and a value to replace.str.translatehandles this nicely (and trivially). The question you marked as a duplicate does not seem to usestr.translateat all.str.translateis nice. This may suffice in this particular case.