Python: Strip everything but spaces and alphanumeric

Question

I have a large string with brackets and commas and such. I want to strip all those characters but keep the spacing. How can I do this. As of now I am using

s         


        

Answer 1

A bit faster implementation:

import re

pattern = re.compile('([^\s\w]|_)+')
strippedList = pattern.sub('', value)