Python: Check if a string contains chinese charact

Question

A string maybe this

ipath= "./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt"

or this

ipath = './data/NCDC/ciampino/6240476818161dat.txt'

How do I know the first string contains chinese?

I find this answer maybe helpful: Find all Chinese text in a string using Python and Regex

but it didn't work out:

import re
ipath= "./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt"
re.findall(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', ipath) # => []

Answer 1

import re
ipath= raw_input()
print re.findall(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', ipath.decode("utf-8"))

Output:./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt [u'\u4e0a\u6d77', u'\u8679\u6865']

You need to decode the input to make it unicode.

or

 import re
 ipath= unicode(raw_input(),encoding="utf-8")
 print re.findall(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', ipath)

Answer 2

According to this question, the range should be [\u2E80-\u2FD5\u3190-\u319f\u3400-\u4DBF\u4E00-\u9FCC]

Answer 3

If you just want to know whether there is a chinese character in your string you don't need re.findall, use re.search and the fact that match objects are truthy.

>>> import re
>>> ipath= u'./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt'
>>> ipath2 = u'./data/NCDC/ciampino/6240476818161dat.txt'
>>> for x in (ipath, ipath2):
...     if re.search(u'[\u4e00-\u9fff]', x):
...         print 'found chinese character in ' + x
... 
found chinese character in ./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt

Answer 4

And for those of us who don't care for re:

>>> ipath= u"./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/6240476818161dat.txt"
>>> for i in range(len(ipath)):
...  if ipath[i] > u'\u4e00' and ipath[i] < u'\u9fff':
...   print ipath[i]
... 
上
海
虹
桥

Edit: for the full list of Chinese characters this SO link is worth looking at as the range U+4E00..U+9FFF is not complete. What's the complete range for Chinese characters in Unicode?

Answer 5

'' is a bytestring on Python 2. Either add from __future__ import unicode_literals at the top of the module or use unicode literals: u'':

>>> import re
>>> ipath= u"./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt"
>>> re.findall(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', ipath)
[u'\u4e0a\u6d77', u'\u8679\u6865']

Answer 6

Using these codepoint ranges, we can write an is_cjk function:

# list of cjk codepoint ranges
# tuples indicate the bottom and top of the range, inclusive
cjk_ranges = [
        ( 0x4E00,  0x62FF),
        ( 0x6300,  0x77FF),
        ( 0x7800,  0x8CFF),
        ( 0x8D00,  0x9FCC),
        ( 0x3400,  0x4DB5),
        (0x20000, 0x215FF),
        (0x21600, 0x230FF),
        (0x23100, 0x245FF),
        (0x24600, 0x260FF),
        (0x26100, 0x275FF),
        (0x27600, 0x290FF),
        (0x29100, 0x2A6DF),
        (0x2A700, 0x2B734),
        (0x2B740, 0x2B81D),
        (0x2B820, 0x2CEAF),
        (0x2CEB0, 0x2EBEF),
        (0x2F800, 0x2FA1F)
    ]

def is_cjk(char):
    char = ord(char)
    for bottom, top in cjk_ranges:
        if char >= bottom and char <= top:
            return True
    return False

Which we can then use to process text, using functions like filter, any, all, and map to process the text character-by-character, or compose more complex functions:

txt = "./data/NCDC/上海/虹桥/9705626661750dat.txt"
txt_sanitized = "./data/NCDC/9705626661750dat.txt"
any(map(is_cjk, txt)) # True
any(map(is_cjk, txt_sanitized)) # False
''.join(filter(is_cjk, txt)) # '上海虹桥'

Note that the CJK ranges will include not only Chinese characters but also may include Korean and Japanese characters. For more complex usage, try a dedicated library like cjklib.