How to replace unicode characters in string with something else python?

Question

I have a string that I got from reading a HTML webpage with bullets that have a symbol like "•" because of the bulleted list. Note that the text is an HTML source from a webpage using Python 2.7's `urllib2.read(webaddress)`. I know the unicode character for the bullet character as `U+2022`, but how do I actually replace that unicode character with something else? I tried doing `str.replace("•", "something")` but it does not appear to work... how do I do this?

Accepted Answer

Decode the string to Unicode. Assuming it's UTF-8-encoded:

```
str.decode("utf-8")
```

Call the `replace` method and be sure to pass it a Unicode string as its first argument:

```
str.decode("utf-8").replace(u"\u2022", "*")
```

Encode back to UTF-8, if needed:

```
str.decode("utf-8").replace(u"\u2022", "*").encode("utf-8")
```

(Fortunately, Python 3 puts a stop to this mess. Step 3 should really only be performed just prior to I/O. Also, mind you that calling a string `str` shadows the built-in type `str`.)

How to replace unicode characters in string with something else python?

Solution

Problem