I'm a beginner with both Python and RegEx, and I would like to know how to make a string that takes symbols and replaces them with spaces. Any help is great.
For example:
how much for the maple syrup? $20.99? That's ricidulous!!! into:
how much for the maple syrup 20 99 That s ridiculous 3 Answers
One way, using regular expressions:
>>> s = "how much for the maple syrup? $20.99? That's ridiculous!!!" >>> re.sub(r'[^\w]', ' ', s) 'how much for the maple syrup 20 99 That s ridiculous ' \wwill match alphanumeric characters and underscores[^\w]will match anything that's not alphanumeric or underscore
Sometimes it takes longer to figure out the regex than to just write it out in python:
import string s = "how much for the maple syrup? $20.99? That's ricidulous!!!" for char in string.punctuation: s = s.replace(char, ' ') If you need other characters you can change it to use a white-list or extend your black-list.
Sample white-list:
whitelist = string.letters + string.digits + ' ' new_s = '' for char in s: if char in whitelist: new_s += char else: new_s += ' ' Sample white-list using a generator-expression:
whitelist = string.letters + string.digits + ' ' new_s = ''.join(c for c in s if c in whitelist) I often just open the console and look for the solution in the objects methods. Quite often it's already there:
>>> a = "hello ' s" >>> dir(a) [ (....) 'partition', 'replace' (....)] >>> a.replace("'", " ") 'hello s' Short answer: Use string.replace().
