string.translate() with unicode data in python

Question

I have 3 API's that return json data to 3 dictionary variables. I am taking some of the values from the dictionary to process them. I read the specific values that I want to the list valuelist. One of the steps is to remove the punctuation from them. I normally use string.translate(None, string.punctuation) for this process but because the dictionary data is unicode I get the error:

    wordlist = [s.translate(None, string.punctuation)for s in valuelist] TypeError: translate() takes exactly one argument (2 given) 

Is there a way around this? Either by encoding the unicode or a replacement for string.translate?

Answer 1

The translate method work differently on Unicode objects than on byte-string objects:

 >>> help(unicode.translate)  S.translate(table) -> unicode  Return a copy of the string S, where all characters have been mapped through the given translation table, which must be a mapping of Unicode ordinals to Unicode ordinals, Unicode strings or None. Unmapped characters are left untouched. Characters mapped to None are deleted. 

So your example would become:

remove_punctuation_map = dict((ord(char), None) for char in string.punctuation) word_list = [s.translate(remove_punctuation_map) for s in value_list] 

Note however that string.punctuation only contains ASCII punctuation. Full Unicode has many more punctuation characters, but it all depends on your use case.