It seems like there should be a simpler way than:
import string
s = \"string. With. Punctuation?\" # Sample string
out = s.translate(string.maketrans(\"\",\
Here's a solution without regex.
import string
input_text = "!where??and!!or$$then:)"
punctuation_replacer = string.maketrans(string.punctuation, ' '*len(string.punctuation))
print ' '.join(input_text.translate(punctuation_replacer).split()).strip()
Output>> where and or then