Split Strings into words with multiple word boundary delimiters

Question

I think what I want to do is a fairly common task but I\'ve found no reference on the web. I have text with punctuation, and I want a list of the words.

\"H         


        

Answer 1

Here is the answer with some explanation.

st = "Hey, you - what are you doing here!?"

# replace all the non alpha-numeric with space and then join.
new_string = ''.join([x.replace(x, ' ') if not x.isalnum() else x for x in st])
# output of new_string
'Hey  you  what are you doing here  '

# str.split() will remove all the empty string if separator is not provided
new_list = new_string.split()

# output of new_list
['Hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']

# we can join it to get a complete string without any non alpha-numeric character
' '.join(new_list)
# output
'Hey you what are you doing'

or in one line, we can do like this:

(''.join([x.replace(x, ' ') if not x.isalnum() else x for x in st])).split()

# output
['Hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']

updated answer