Trying to find a substring of awkwardly formatted string in Python

Question

I am using ScraPy to get some information from a site and am getting a string back that looks like this:

[u'Oxfam-America Inc. \n            ']

What I need is to get just the "Oxfam-America Inc." part back. Suggestions?

Chad S. · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-21 23:16:25Z

4

>>> [u'Oxfam-America Inc. \n            '][0].strip()
u'Oxfam-America Inc.'

The method you want is .strip(). The problem is compounded because what you are getting back is a list, not a string, so you have to first access the 0th element in the list, then call the .strip() method on that string.

So for example if the variable assigned to the list you showed in the question were assigned to field you could print it with the following..

field = [u'Oxfam-America Inc. \n            ']
stripped_text = field[0].strip()
print stripped_text

edited Sep 21, 2015 at 23:16

answered Sep 21, 2015 at 23:05

Chad S.

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4 Comments

rdevn00b Over a year ago

This is a step in the right direction, but I need ONLY Oxfam-America Inc.

rdevn00b Over a year ago

What about the u at the beginning?

Chad S. Over a year ago

That isn't part of the string.. that's just a notational device to let you know that the object is a unicode string.

rdevn00b Over a year ago

Also, what does strip() do exactly? It looks like it removes all returns and extra characters?

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