Extracting words from a string, removing punctuation and returning a list with separated words

Question

I was wondering how to implement a function get_words() that returns the words in a string in a list, stripping away the punctuation.

How I would like t

Answer 1

Try to use re:

>>> [w for w in re.split('\W', 'Hello world, my name is...James!') if w]
['Hello', 'world', 'my', 'name', 'is', 'James']

Although I'm not sure that it will catch all your use cases.

If you want to solve it in another way, you may specify characters that you want to be in result:

>>> re.findall('[%s]+' % string.ascii_letters, 'Hello world, my name is...James!')
['Hello', 'world', 'my', 'name', 'is', 'James']