How to rermove non-alphanumeric characters at the beginning or end of a string

Question

I have a list with elements that have unnecessary (non-alphanumeric) characters at the beginning or end of each string.

Ex.

\'cats--\'

Answer 1

I believe that this is the shortest non-regex solution:

text = "`23`12foo--=+"

while len(text) > 0 and not text[0].isalnum():
    text = text[1:]
while len(text) > 0 and not text[-1].isalnum():
    text = text[:-1]

print text