How can I remove all the punctuations from a string?

Question

for removing all punctuations from a string, x. i want to use re.findall(), but i've been struggling to know what to write in it.. i know that i can get all the punctuations by writing:

import string
y = string.punctuation

but if i write:

re.findall(y,x) 

it says:

 raise error("multiple repeat")
 sre_constants.error: multiple repeat

can someone explain what exactly we should write in re.findall function?

Answer 1

You may not even need RegEx for this. You can simply use translate, like this

import string
print data.translate(None, string.punctuation)

Answer 2

Several characters in string.punctuation have special meaning in regular expression. They should be escaped.

>>> import re
>>> string.punctuation
'!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'
>>> import re
>>> re.escape(string.punctuation)
'\\!\\"\\#\\$\\%\\&\\\'\\(\\)\\*\\+\\,\\-\\.\\/\\:\\;\\<\\=\\>\\?\\@\\[\\\\\\]\\^\\_\\`\\{\\|\\}\\~'

And if you want to match any one of them, use character class ([...])

>>> '[{}]'.format(re.escape(string.punctuation))
'[\\!\\"\\#\\$\\%\\&\\\'\\(\\)\\*\\+\\,\\-\\.\\/\\:\\;\\<\\=\\>\\?\\@\\[\\\\\\]\\^\\_\\`\\{\\|\\}\\~]'

---

>>> import re
>>> pattern = '[{}]'.format(re.escape(string.punctuation))
>>> re.sub(pattern, '', 'Hell,o World.')
'Hello World'