Removing unwanted characters from a string in Python

Question

I have some strings that I want to delete some unwanted characters from them. For example: Adam\'sApple ----> AdamsApple.(case insensitive) Can someone help

Answer 1

Any characters in the 2nd argument of the translate method are deleted:

>>> "Adam's Apple!".translate(None,"'!")
'Adams Apple'

NOTE: translate requires Python 2.6 or later to use None for the first argument, which otherwise must be a translation string of length 256. string.maketrans('','') can be used in place of None for pre-2.6 versions.

Answer 2

Let's say we have the following list:

states = [' Alabama ', 'Georgia!', 'Georgia', 'georgia', 'south carolina##', 'West virginia?']

Now we will define a function clean_strings()

import re

def clean_strings(strings):
    result = []
    for value in strings:
        value = value.strip()
        value = re.sub('[!#?]', '', value)
        value = value.title()
        result.append(value)
    return result

When we call the function clean_strings(states)

The result will look like:

['Alabama',
'Georgia',
'Georgia',
'Georgia',
'Florida',
'South Carolina',
'West Virginia']

Answer 3

Try:

"Adam'sApple".replace("'", '')

One step further, to replace multiple characters with nothing:

import re
print re.sub(r'''['"x]''', '', '''a'"xb''')

Yields:

ab