Python remove anything that is not a letter or number

Question

I\'m having a little trouble with Python regular expressions.

What is a good way to remove all characters in a string that are not letters or numbers?

Thanks

Answer 1

'\W' is the same as [^A-Za-z0-9_] plus accented chars from your locale.

>>> re.sub('\W', '', 'text 1, 2, 3...')
'text123'

Maybe you want to keep the spaces or have all the words (and numbers):

>>> re.findall('\w+', 'my. text, --without-- (punctuation) 123')
['my', 'text', 'without', 'punctuation', '123']