How to remove special characters except space from a file in python?

Question

I have a huge corpus of text (line by line) and I want to remove special characters but sustain the space and structure of the string.

hello? there A-Z-R_T(,**)         


        

Answer 1

A more elegant solution would be

print(re.sub(r"\W+|_", " ", string))

>>> hello there A Z R T world welcome to python this should the next line followed by another million like this

Here, re is regex module in python

re.sub will substitute pattern with space i.e., " "

r'' will treat input string as raw (with \n)

\W for all non-words i.e. all special characters *&^%$ etc excluding underscore _

+ will match zero to unlimited matches, similar to * (one to more)

| is logical OR

_ stands for underscore