[SOLVED] How to replace characters in a string?

[Winfried]

Hello,

I can't get Python to replace a string in a string: If I read the HTML file as binary, it fails; If I open it as text, it fails too :-/

#UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 14167: character maps to <undefined>
#with open(INPUTFILE, 'r') as f:

with open(INPUTFILE, 'rb') as f:
	content_text = f.read()

#TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str'
#content_text.replace("<i>","[i]")
content_text = str(content_text)
content_text.replace("<i>","[i]")

#for some reason, no matter the input (string or bytes), BS will just output first line
content_text = content_text.encode(encoding='UTF-8')
soup = BeautifulSoup(content_text, 'xml')
#<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>, and then stops
print(soup.prettify())

What's the right way to 1) replace a string in a string, and then 2) have Beautiful Soup parse the input successfully?

Thank you.

---
Edit: Since it's no possible to delete a thread, I'll just add the answer… which was simple enough: Read the file as text telling Python which encoding to use (Windows=Latin1 by default), which BeautifulSoup reads fine (doesn't need to be bytes)

with open(INPUTFILE, 'r',encoding='utf-8') as f:
	content_text = f.read()

content_text.replace("<i>","[i]")

soup = BS(content_text, 'xml')
print(soup.prettify())

[Gribouillis]

Strings are immutable. The replace() method creates a new string and leaves the original string unchanged.

>>> s = "spam spam <i> spam"
>>> t = s.replace("<i>", "[i]")
>>> t
'spam spam [i] spam'
>>> s
'spam spam <i> spam'
>>> 

[Winfried]

Good to know, thanks