i'm trying to keep only the letters in a string. i am trying to do something like this:
s = '1208uds9f8sdf978qh39h9i#H(&#*H(&H97dgh'
s_ = lambda: letter if letter.isalpha(), s
this errors out. how would a working version look?
i'm trying to keep only the letters in a string. i am trying to do something like this:
s = '1208uds9f8sdf978qh39h9i#H(&#*H(&H97dgh'
s_ = lambda: letter if letter.isalpha(), s
this errors out. how would a working version look?
how about
re.sub('[^a-zA-Z]','', s)
or
"".join([x for x in s if x.isalpha()])
Alternately:
s_ = filter(lambda c: c.isalpha(), s)
One handy way to manipulate strings is using a generator function and the join
method:
result = "".join( letter for letter in s if letter.isalpha() )
You don't need a lambda function:
result = ''.join(c for c in input_str if c.isalpha())
If you really want to use a lambda function you could write it as follows:
result = ''.join(filter(lambda c:str.isalpha(c), input_str))
But this can also be simplified to:
result = ''.join(filter(str.isalpha, input_str))
You probably want a list comprehension here:
s_ = [letter for letter in s if letter.isalpha()]
However, this will give you a list of strings (each one character long). To convert this into a single string, you can use join
:
s2 = ''.join(s_)
If you want, you can combine the two into a single statement:
s_ = ''.join(letter for letter in s if letter.isalpha())
If you particularly want or need to use a lambda function, you can use filter
instead of the generator:
my_func = lambda letter: letter.isalpha()
s_ = ''.join(filter(my_func, s))
>>> s = '1208uds9f8sdf978qh39h9i#H(&#*H(&H97dgh'
>>> ''.join(e for e in s if e.isalpha())
'udsfsdfqhhiHHHdgh'
This is kind of the long way round, but will let you create a filter for any arbitrary set of characters.
import string
def strfilter(validChars):
vc = set(validChars)
def filter(s):
return ''.join(ch for ch in s if ch in vc)
return filter
filterAlpha = strfilter(string.letters)
filterAlpha('1208uds9f8sdf978qh39h9i#H(&#*H(&H97dgh') # -> 'udsfsdfqhhiHHHdgh'