Remove characters between backslashes in string in Python

Question

Is this the correct way to remove everything between two backward slashes?

clean = re.sub(r'\\.+?\\', '', clean)

Example input:

a\ue00f\ue010\ue011\ue012\ue013\a

Example output:

aa

Are the things like \ue00f literally that or are they Unicode characters? — user2555451
– user2555451, Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 21:04
Well, does it work? (My guess: No, because it is non-greedy, because of your ? after the plus. Remove that and it'll be greedy.) — L3viathan
– L3viathan, Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 21:12
@MalikBrahimi: I don't think that that's a fair assumption. The OP is probably looking at repr() output and not understanding that the \uhhhh escape sequences are really single Unicode codepoints that are not printable. That needs to be clarified before the question is answerable. — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented Feb 1, 2015 at 21:16

dylrei · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-01 21:15:17Z

1

Maybe split() can help here:

>>> input = r'a\ue00f\ue010\ue011\ue012\ue013\a'
>>> elems = input.split('\\')
>>> ''.join((elems[0], elems[-1]))
'aa'

answered Feb 1, 2015 at 21:15

dylrei

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2 Comments

Samuel Weisenthal Over a year ago

Isn't there a way to just match anything between backward slashes and just replace it with nothing?

dylrei Over a year ago

@Sam I'm not sure why there would be such a thing built into the language... but that's essentially what I'm doing. What's not helpful about the solution I've offered?

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