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?

Answer 1

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

   str.decode("utf-8")
   

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

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

3. 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.)