Remove the non utf-8 characters from a String in Python

# Remove the non utf-8 characters from a String in Python

To remove the non utf-8 characters from a string:

1. Use the str.encode() method to encode the string to a bytes object.
2. Set the errors keyword argument to ignore to drop any non utf-8 characters.
3. Use the bytes.decode() method to decode the bytes object to a string.

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my_str = '\x86bobbyhadz.com\x86'

result = my_str.encode(
    'utf-8', errors='ignore'
).decode('utf-8')

print(result)  # 👉️ 'bobbyhadz.com'

If you are starting with a bytes object, use the following code sample instead.

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my_bytes = 'bobbyhadz.com'.encode('utf-8')

result = my_bytes.decode(
  'utf-8', errors='ignore'
).encode('utf-8')

print(result)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

The example removes the non utf-8 characters from a string.

The str.encode method returns an encoded version of the string as a bytes object. The default encoding is utf-8.

Any characters that cannot be encoded using the utf-8 encoding will get dropped from the string.

The next step is to decode the bytes object using the utf-8 encoding.

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my_str = 'abc'

result = my_str.encode('utf-8', errors='ignore').decode('utf-8')
print(result)  # 👉️ 'abc'

The bytes.decode method returns a string decoded from the given bytes. The default encoding is utf-8.

The result is a string that doesn't contain any non utf-8 characters.

# Remove the non utf-8 characters from a File

If you need to remove the non-utf-8 characters when reading from a file, use a for loop to iterate over the lines in the file and repeat the same process.

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with open('example.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    lines = f.readlines()

    for line in lines:
        line = line.encode(
          'utf-8', errors='ignore'
        ).decode('utf-8')

        print(line)

The code sample assumes that you have an example.txt file located in the same directory as your Python script.

# Remove the non utf-8 characters when starting with a Bytes object

If you are starting with a bytes object, you have to use the decode() method to decode the bytes object to a string first.

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my_bytes = 'bobbyhadz.com'.encode('utf-8')

result = my_bytes.decode('utf-8', errors='ignore').encode('utf-8')

print(result)  # 👉️ b'bobbyhadz.com'

Make sure to set the errors keyword argument to ignore in the call to the decode() method to drop any non-utf-8 characters when converting to a string.

# Additional Resources

You can learn more about the related topics by checking out the following tutorials:

• Remove Newline characters from a List or a String in Python
• Remove non-alphanumeric characters from a Python string
• Remove non-ASCII characters from a string in Python
• Remove punctuation from a List of strings in Python
• How to remove Quotes from a List of Strings in Python
• Remove characters matching Regex from a String in Python
• Remove special characters except Space from String in Python
• Remove square brackets from a List or a String in Python
• How to Remove the Tabs from a String in Python