Regular Expression - Remove all special characters except alphanumeric and accents

Question

How is possible to remove all special characters except alphanumeric and accents?

I tried something like:

text = 'abcdeáéí.@# '
re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚâêîôÂÊÎÔãõÃÕçÇ: ]', ' ', text)

But I hadn't success. the following expression is valid to allow just alphanumeric but not to accents:

tmp = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9: ]', '', x)

Could someone help me?

Answer 1

Make your text a unicode string text = u'abcdeáéí.@# ' and make sure your pattern is able to accept unicode characters as well re.sub(u'[^a-zA-Z0-9áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚâêîôÂÊÎÔãõÃÕçÇ: ]', ' ', text)

With this combination, I get u'abcde\\xe1\\xe9\\xed ' as a result (where \\xe1 etc. are escape codes for the accent characters in text

There's no need for r in front of the pattern if you aren't escaping any characters. It's there so you can write things like r'\\d\\w' instead of '\\\\d\\\\w'