Remove characters except digits from string using Python?

How can I remove all characters except numbers from string?

Use re.sub, like so:

>>> import re
>>> re.sub('\D', '', 'aas30dsa20')
'3020'

\D matches any non-digit character so, the code above, is essentially replacing every non-digit character for the empty string.

Or you can use filter, like so (in Python 2):

>>> filter(str.isdigit, 'aas30dsa20')
'3020'

Since in Python 3, filter returns an iterator instead of a list, you can use the following instead:

>>> ''.join(filter(str.isdigit, 'aas30dsa20'))
'3020'

In Python 2.*, by far the fastest approach is the .translate method:

>>> x='aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52'
>>> import string
>>> all=string.maketrans('','')
>>> nodigs=all.translate(all, string.digits)
>>> x.translate(all, nodigs)
'1233344554552'
>>>

string.maketrans makes a translation table (a string of length 256) which in this case is the same as ''.join(chr(x) for x in range(256)) (just faster to make;-). .translate applies the translation table (which here is irrelevant since all essentially means identity) AND deletes characters present in the second argument -- the key part.

.translate works very differently on Unicode strings (and strings in Python 3 -- I do wish questions specified which major-release of Python is of interest!) -- not quite this simple, not quite this fast, though still quite usable.

Back to 2.*, the performance difference is impressive...:

$ python -mtimeit -s'import string; all=string.maketrans("", ""); nodig=all.translate(all, string.digits); x="aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52"' 'x.translate(all, nodig)'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.04 usec per loop
$ python -mtimeit -s'import re;  x="aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52"' 're.sub(r"\D", "", x)'
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.9 usec per loop

Speeding things up by 7-8 times is hardly peanuts, so the translate method is well worth knowing and using. The other popular non-RE approach...:

$ python -mtimeit -s'x="aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52"' '"".join(i for i in x if i.isdigit())'
100000 loops, best of 3: 11.5 usec per loop

is 50% slower than RE, so the .translate approach beats it by over an order of magnitude.

In Python 3, or for Unicode, you need to pass .translate a mapping (with ordinals, not characters directly, as keys) that returns None for what you want to delete. Here's a convenient way to express this for deletion of "everything but" a few characters:

import string

class Del:
  def __init__(self, keep=string.digits):
    self.comp = dict((ord(c),c) for c in keep)
  def __getitem__(self, k):
    return self.comp.get(k)

DD = Del()

x='aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52'
x.translate(DD)

also emits '1233344554552'. However, putting this in xx.py we have...:

$ python3.1 -mtimeit -s'import re;  x="aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52"' 're.sub(r"\D", "", x)'
100000 loops, best of 3: 8.43 usec per loop
$ python3.1 -mtimeit -s'import xx; x="aaa12333bb445bb54b5b52"' 'x.translate(xx.DD)'
10000 loops, best of 3: 24.3 usec per loop

...which shows the performance advantage disappears, for this kind of "deletion" tasks, and becomes a performance decrease.

s=''.join(i for i in s if i.isdigit())

Another generator variant.

Remove characters except digits from string using Python?

Related

Recent Posts