How to Remove Special Characters, Punctuation, and Spaces from a String in Python

Removing Special Characters, Punctuation, and Spaces from a String

The task of removing all special characters, punctuation, and spaces from a string requires that only letters and numbers remain. This can be achieved in several ways.

Non-Regex Approach

For an alternative approach that doesn't utilize regular expressions, you can use a comprehension list.

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
>>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum())
'Specialcharactersspaces888323'

The str.isalnum() method helps identify alphanumeric characters, and the comprehension list filters out those that are not.

Regex Approach

If you prefer using regular expressions, you can opt for the following:

<code class="python">import re

string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
cleaned_string = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9]', '', string)</code>

Here, we employ re.sub() to replace all non-alphanumeric characters with an empty string.

Best Practice Recommendation

While regex can offer elegant solutions, using non-regex approaches is generally preferable for performance and simplicity reasons.

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