collapsing whitespace in a string

Question

I have a string that kind of looks like this:

\"stuff   .  // : /// more-stuff .. .. ...$%$% stuff -> DD\"

and I want to strip off all p

Answer 1

s = "$$$aa1bb2 cc-dd ee_ff ggg."
re.sub(r'\W+', ' ', s).upper()
# ' AA1BB2 CC DD EE_FF GGG '

Is _ punctuation?

re.sub(r'[_\W]+', ' ', s).upper()
# ' AA1BB2 CC DD EE FF GGG '

Don't want the leading and trailing space?

re.sub(r'[_\W]+', ' ', s).strip().upper()
# 'AA1BB2 CC DD EE FF GGG'