Strip Trademark Symbol from string Python

Question

I'm trying to prep some data for a designer. I'm pulling data out of SQL Server with python on a Windows machine (not sure if OS is important). How would I make the string 'Official Trademark™' = 'Official Trademark'? Also, any further information/reading on unicode or the pertinent subject matter would help me become a little more independent. Thanks for any help!

Edited:

Perhaps I should have included some code. I'm now getting this error during run time: 'UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x99 in position 2:ordinal not in range(128).' Here is my code:

row.note = 'TM™ Data\n'
t = row.note
t = t.rstrip(os.linesep).lstrip(os.linesep)
t = t.replace(u"\u2122",'')

Solution 1

The trademark symbol is Unicode character U+2122, or in Python notation u"\u2122".

Just do a search and replace:

'string'.replace(u"\u2122", '')

Solution 2

>>> 'Official Trademark™'.strip('™')
'Official Trademark'
>>> 

Comments

[Blender]

You can't use non-ascii characters in Python source code: codepad.org/ymgtruH9

[infrared]

You can, you just have to make # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- the first line in your source file: codepad.org/BYIPuDox

[Petr Viktorin]

In Python 3, the declaration is not required any more. In Python 2, you should use unicode strings, u'™'.

[Jochen Ritzel]

The " (gotta be careful with that Unicode, as you must .decode() it when printing)" part is misleading, you only have to encode yourself when Python thinks your terminal only supports ascii. I think for some reason on Windows it does.

[heltonbiker]

I put #coding: utf-8 as the second line of the script (the first being the shebang #!/usr/bin/env python) and it works too.

[Jochen Ritzel]

When you print unicode Python automatically encodes it with the encoding given by sys.stdout.encoding. If your terminal is set up properly then that should be UTF-8 or whatever encoding makes sense for your language. Otherwise the encoding defaults to ascii and printing non-ascii characters will fail.