Best way to strip punctuation from a string

Question

It seems like there should be a simpler way than:

import string
s = \"string. With. Punctuation?\" # Sample string 
out = s.translate(string.maketrans(\"\",\         


        

Answer 1

For Python 3 str or Python 2 unicode values, str.translate() only takes a dictionary; codepoints (integers) are looked up in that mapping and anything mapped to None is removed.

To remove (some?) punctuation then, use:

import string

remove_punct_map = dict.fromkeys(map(ord, string.punctuation))
s.translate(remove_punct_map)

The dict.fromkeys() class method makes it trivial to create the mapping, setting all values to None based on the sequence of keys.

To remove all punctuation, not just ASCII punctuation, your table needs to be a little bigger; see J.F. Sebastian's answer (Python 3 version):

import unicodedata
import sys

remove_punct_map = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode)
                                 if unicodedata.category(chr(i)).startswith('P'))