I am currently using Beautiful Soup to parse an HTML file and calling get_text(), but it seems like I’m being left with a lot of \xa0 Unicode representing spaces. Is there an efficient way to remove all of them in Python 2.7, and change them into spaces? I guess the more generalized question would be, is there a way to remove Unicode formatting?
I tried using: line = line.replace(u'\xa0',' '), as suggested by another thread, but that changed the \xa0’s to u’s, so now I have “u”s everywhere instead. ):
EDIT: The problem seems to be resolved by str.replace(u'\xa0', ' ').encode('utf-8'), but just doing .encode('utf-8') without replace() seems to cause it to spit out even weirder characters, \xc2 for instance. Can anyone explain this?