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

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Answer 1

The regular-expression based versions might be faster (especially if you switch to using a compiled expression), but I like this for clarity:

"".join([c for c in origList if c in string.letters or c in string.whitespace])

It's a bit weird with the join() call, but I think that is pretty idiomatic Python for converting a list of characters into a string.