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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?

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.)
                could you please elaborate in what way "Python 3 puts a stop to this mess"? How would I do this in Python 3 then?
– cryanbhu
                Apr 9, 2019 at 10:48
                When trying: re.sub(u'2022', varcontainingstring, ''), it makes the string empty with nothing in it.
– Rolando
                Oct 26, 2012 at 20:25
                @AntonTeodor Regex is less efficient than a simple string search and replace. It will work though
– NullUserException
                Oct 3, 2018 at 16:17
Try this one.
you will get the output in a normal string
str.encode().decode('unicode-escape')
and after that, you can perform any replacement.
str.replace('•','something')
str1 = "This is Python\u500cPool"
Encode the string to ASCII and replace all the utf-8 characters with '?'.
str1 = str1.encode("ascii", "replace")
Decode the byte stream to string.
str1 = str1.decode(encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore")
Replace the question mark with the desired character.
str1 = str1.replace("?"," ")
If you want to remove all \u character. Code below for you
def replace_unicode_character(self, content: str):
    content = content.encode('utf-8')
    if "\\x80" in str(content):
        count_unicode = 0
        i = 0
        while i < len(content):
            if "\\x" in str(content[i:i + 1]):
                if count_unicode % 3 == 0:
                    content = content[:i] + b'\x80\x80\x80' + content[i + 3:]
                i += 2
                count_unicode += 1
            i += 1
        content = content.replace(b'\x80\x80\x80', b'')
    return content.decode('utf-8')
        
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