title: Python: Getting rid of \u200b from a string using regular expressions
body: <p>I have a web scraper that takes forum questions, splits them into individual words and writes it to the text file. The words are stored in a list of tuples. Each tuple contains the word and its frequency. Like so...</p>
  
  <pre><code>[(u'move', 3), (u'exploration', 4), (u'prediction', 21),
   (u'find', 5), (u'user', 2), (u'interface', 2), (u'pleasant', 2),
   (u'am', 11), (u'puzzled', 2), (u'find', 5), (u'way', 5),
   (u'prediction', 21), (u'mode', 2), (u'have', 21),
   (u'explored', 2), (u'file', 9), (u'Can', 7), (u'help', 6),
   (u'Possible', 1), (u'bug', 2), (u'data', 31), (u'is', 17)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>however, some person on the forum used the character \u200b which breaks all my code because that character is no longer a Unicode whitespace.</p>
  
  <pre><code>(u'used\u200b', 1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Printing it out does not produce an error, but writing to a text file does. I have found that <code>string.strip()</code> and <code>string.replace()</code> do not help, so I was wondering how to use the regex library to get rid of that character. I plan on parsing through the entire list of tuples to find it.</p>