Python regex, remove all punctuation except hyphen for unicode string

Question

I have this code for removing all punctuation from a regex string:

import regex as re    
re.sub(ur\"\\p{P}+\", \"\", txt)

How would I chan

Answer 1

Here's how to do it with the re module, in case you have to stick with the standard libraries:

# works in python 2 and 3
import re
import string

remove = string.punctuation
remove = remove.replace("-", "") # don't remove hyphens
pattern = r"[{}]".format(remove) # create the pattern

txt = ")*^%{}[]thi's - is - @@#!a !%%!!%- test."
re.sub(pattern, "", txt) 
# >>> 'this - is - a - test'

If performance matters, you may want to use str.translate, since it's faster than using a regex. In Python 3, the code is txt.translate({ord(char): None for char in remove}).