Replace all non-alphanumeric characters in a string

Question

I have a string with which i want to replace any character that isn\'t a standard character or number such as (a-z or 0-9) with an asterisk. For example, \"h^&ell`.,|o w

Answer 1

Regex to the rescue!

import re

s = re.sub('[^0-9a-zA-Z]+', '*', s)

Example:

>>> re.sub('[^0-9a-zA-Z]+', '*', 'h^&ell`.,|o w]{+orld')
'h*ell*o*w*orld'