Best way to strip punctuation from a string

Question

It seems like there should be a simpler way than:

import string
s = \"string. With. Punctuation?\" # Sample string 
out = s.translate(string.maketrans(\"\",\         


        

Answer 1

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

• Replaces the punctuations with spaces
• Replace multiple spaces in between words with a single space
• Remove the trailing spaces, if any with strip()

Answer 2

I like to use a function like this:

def scrub(abc):
    while abc[-1] is in list(string.punctuation):
        abc=abc[:-1]
    while abc[0] is in list(string.punctuation):
        abc=abc[1:]
    return abc