replace special characters in a string python

Question

I am using urllib to get a string of html from a website and need to put each word in the html document into a list.

Here is the code I have so far. I keep getting a

Answer 1

You need to call replace on z and not on str, since you want to replace characters located in the string variable z

removeSpecialChars = z.replace("!@#$%^&*()[]{};:,./<>?\|`~-=_+", " ")

But this will not work, as replace looks for a substring, you will most likely need to use regular expression module re with the sub function:

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

Don't forget the [], which indicates that this is a set of characters to be replaced.