Remove 4-byte Characters from Strings in Python
2023-03-06 16:01 (1 years ago)
ytyng
In this blog post, I will introduce a Python function that removes 4-byte characters from a string. This can be particularly useful when dealing with emojis or other special characters that are encoded as 4 bytes in UTF-8. Here's the function:
def remove_4bytes_char(text):
"""
Remove 4-byte characters from a string
"""
# Convert the string to a bytearray
byte_string = bytearray(text.encode('utf-8'))
# Remove 4-byte UTF-8 characters from the byte array
while b'\xf0' in byte_string:
index = byte_string.index(b'\xf0')
if index + 3 < len(byte_string):
for _i in range(4):
byte_string.pop(index)
# Convert the bytearray back to a string
return byte_string.decode('utf-8')First, the function remove_4bytes_char takes a string text as input. It then converts this string to a bytearray object using UTF-8 encoding. This is necessary because 4-byte characters are easier to identify and manipulate at the byte level.
Next, the function enters a while loop that continues as long as it finds a 4-byte character, which starts with the byte \xf0. When it finds this byte, it removes it along with the next three bytes, effectively removing the 4-byte character from the bytearray.
Finally, the function converts the modified bytearray back into a string using UTF-8 decoding and returns the result.
This function can help sanitize text input by removing unwanted 4-byte characters, which is especially useful when dealing with text data that should not contain emojis or other special characters.
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