How can I remove or replace all punctuation characters from a String?

Question

I have a string composed of words, some of which contain punctuation, which I would like to remove, but I have been unable to figure out how to do this.

For example if I

Answer 1

let charactersToRemove = NSCharacterSet.punctuationCharacterSet().invertedSet
let aWord = "".join(words.componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet(charactersToRemove))