Best way to strip punctuation from a string

Question

It seems like there should be a simpler way than:

import string
s = \"string. With. Punctuation?\" # Sample string 
out = s.translate(string.maketrans(\"\",\         


        

Answer 1

string.punctuation misses loads of punctuation marks that are commonly used in the real world. How about a solution that works for non-ASCII punctuation?

import regex
s = u"string. With. Some・Really Weird、Non？ASCII。 「（Punctuation）」?"
remove = regex.compile(ur'[\p{C}|\p{M}|\p{P}|\p{S}|\p{Z}]+', regex.UNICODE)
remove.sub(u" ", s).strip()

Personally, I believe this is the best way to remove punctuation from a string in Python because:

• It removes all Unicode punctuation
• It's easily modifiable, e.g. you can remove the \{S} if you want to remove punctuation, but keep symbols like $.
• You can get really specific about what you want to keep and what you want to remove, for example \{Pd} will only remove dashes.
• This regex also normalizes whitespace. It maps tabs, carriage returns, and other oddities to nice, single spaces.

This uses Unicode character properties, which you can read more about on Wikipedia.