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

This workaround works in python 3:

import string
ex_str = 'SFDF-OIU .df  !hello.dfasf  sad - - d-f - sd'
#because len(string.punctuation) = 32
table = str.maketrans(string.punctuation,' '*32) 
res = ex_str.translate(table)

# res = 'SFDF OIU  df   hello dfasf  sad     d f   sd'