Python: Strip Everything But Spaces And Alphanumeric

I have a large string with brackets and commas and such. I want to strip all those characters but keep the spacing. How can I do this. As of now I am using strippedList = re.sub(r'

Solution 1:

re.sub(r'([^\s\w]|_)+', '', origList)

Solution 2:

A bit faster implementation:

importrepattern= re.compile('([^\s\w]|_)+')
strippedList = pattern.sub('', value)

Solution 3:

The regular-expression based versions might be faster (especially if you switch to using a compiled expression), but I like this for clarity:

"".join([c for c in origList if c instring.letters or c instring.whitespace])

It's a bit weird with the join() call, but I think that is pretty idiomatic Python for converting a list of characters into a string.

Solution 4:

Demonstrating what characters you will get in the result:

>>>s = ''.join(chr(i) for i inrange(256)) # all possible bytes>>>re.sub(r'[^\s\w_]+','',s) # What will remain
'\t\n\x0b\x0c\r 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

Docs: re.sub, Regex HOWTO: Matching Characters, Regex HOWTO: Repeating Things