How do I replace punctuation in a string in Python?

Question

I would like to replace (and not remove) all punctuation characters by \" \" in a string in Python.

Is there something efficient of the following flavo

Answer 1

In my specific way, I removed "+" and "&" from the punctuation list:

all_punctuations = string.punctuation
selected_punctuations = re.sub(r'(\&|\+)', "", all_punctuations)
print selected_punctuations

str = "he+llo* ithis& place% if you * here @@"
punctuation_regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(selected_punctuations))
punc_free = punctuation_regex.sub("", str)
print punc_free

Result: he+llo ithis& place if you here