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

You can use a regex expression. The method re.sub() will take three parameters:

• The regex expression
• The replacement
• The string

Code:

import re

s = 'cats--'
output = re.sub("[^\\w]", "", s)

print output

Explanation:

• The part "\\w" matches any alphanumeric character.
• [^x] will match any character that is not x