remove punctuation from unicode: error

Question

I need to remove punctuation from a unicode string. I've read a few posts and the most recommended one was this one .

I've implemented the following:

table = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode) if unicodedata.category(chr(i)).startswith('P'))

def tokenize(message):
    message = unicode(message,'utf-8').lower()
    #print message
    message = remove_punctuation_unicode(message)
    return message

def remove_punctuation_unicode(string):
    return string.translate(table)

But when I run the code, this error pops up:

table = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode) if unicodedata.category(chr(i)).startswith('P'))
TypeError: must be unicode, not str

I can't quite figure it out what to do. Can someone tell me how to fix this?

Answer 1

Try unichr instead of chr :

Python 2.7.10 (default, Oct 14 2015, 16:09:02) 
[GCC 5.2.1 20151010] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys, unicodedata
>>> table = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode) if unicodedata.category(unichr(i)).startswith('P'))
>>>