special character with chinese characters not substituted in python string

Question

I cannot seem to substitute a '）' or a '（' without causing errors in other strings. '）' and '（' are special characters. Here are two strings "sample（志信达）.mbox" and "sample#宋安兴.mbox" . If I use re to substitute the characters,the chinese character suffers a substitution too. Here is the code in python:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
source1='sample（志信达）.mbox'
source2='sample#宋安兴.mbox'
newname1=re.sub(r'[\(\);）（]','-',source1)
newname2=re.sub(r'[\(\);）（]','-',source2)
print source1,newname1
print source2,newname2

Here is the result:

sample（志信达）.mbox sample---志信达---.mbox
sample#宋安兴.mbox sample#宋?-兴.mbox

Notice that one of the characters is replaced with '?-'

Answer 1

You should use unicode literals (see https://docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html#unicode-literals-in-python-source-code ):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
source1 = u'sample（志信达）.mbox'
source2 = u'sample#宋安兴.mbox'
newname1 = re.sub(ur'[\(\);）（]','-',source1)
newname2 = re.sub(ur'[\(\);）（]','-',source2)
print source1,newname1
print source2,newname2

result:

sample（志信达）.mbox sample-志信达-.mbox
sample#宋安兴.mbox sample#宋安兴.mbox

Also, do not forget to save your .py file in UTF-8 (your IDE may do this automatically or you may have to manually change encoding depending on the text editor you use).