Remove unicode [u']

Question

I have this string, input from a webpage.

s = "[u'967208', u'411600', u'460273']"

I want to remove the brackets [ ] and u and ' .

I would also like to make new line breaks instead of the commas , .

I have spent much time searching for a solution, including encoding and regex, but I can't seem to get it working.

Updated : This is what I use to retrieve the string:

import selenium
import re
input = webdriver.find_element_by_class_name("class_name")
s = re.findall("((?<=\()[0-9]*)", input.text)

Answer 1

>>> import ast
>>> s = "[u'967208', u'411600', u'460273']"
>>> a = ast.literal_eval(s)
>>> print(*a, sep='\n')
967208
411600
460273

Answer 2

If you just want the digits with re just use \\d+ :

import re

s = "[u'967208', u'411600', u'460273']"
print "\n".join(re.findall(r"\d+", s))
967208
411600
460273

It is safe and efficient:

In [7]: timeit "\n".join(literal_eval(s))
100000 loops, best of 3: 11.7 µs per loop

In [8]: r = re.compile(r"\d+")

In [9]: timeit "\n".join(r.findall(s))
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.35 µs per loop

If your goal is to write each string to a file, you can use the csv module to write the list of strings returned from re.findall, using a newline as the delimiter:

s = u"[u'967208', u'411600', u'460273']"

import csv
import re
with open("out.csv","w") as out:
    wr = csv.writer(out,delimiter="\n")
    r = re.compile("\d+")
    wr.writerow(r.findall(s))

Output:

967208
411600
460273

If you have many strings just iterate calling call r.findall and pass the result to writerow.

I think after the comments the mystery is solved, you had a list of digits all along that was returned from your regex using findall so you can do the following:

u"abc(967208) \n abc2(411600) \n abc3(460273)" # input.text

import csv
import re
with open("out.csv","w") as out:
    wr = csv.writer(out,delimiter="\n")
    r = re.compile("\((\d+)\)")
    wr.writerow(r.findall(input.text))

\\((\\d+)\\) will find 1+ digits inside parens.