How to get rid of special characters in python string objects

Question

here is my code

def get_current_branch():
"returns current working branch."
init()
try:
    with cd(env.repo_path):
        with hide('output','running','warnings'):
            cmd = 'git branch'
            out = run(cmd, shell=True).split('\n')
            print out
            for branch in out:
                if '*' in branch:
                    temp = branch.split(' ')[1]
                    out = temp

        return out

except Exception as msg:
    print(red("\nError!!!\n\n" + str(msg)))

output of above code comes out to be :

['RALP\x1b[m\r', '  SALP\x1b[m\r', '* \x1b[32mintegration\x1b[m']

The actual branch names are RALP, SALP and integration. But all these special characters are ruining the text processing. How can I get rid of these characters ?

Answer 1

Remove them using regex

import re

out = re.sub('\x1b[^m]*m', '', out)
out = re.sub('\r$', '', out)
out = re.sub('\*', '', out)
out = out.strip()

FYI, these sequences are the ANSI escape codes which are used to add color to the text in the terminal. If you run git branch --no-color , some of the portion would be automatically removed.

Also, change temp = branch.split(' ')[1] to temp = branch.split('*')[1] . This should automatically remove the * in the current branch.