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

In the char set matching rule [...] you can specify ^ as first char to mean "not in"

import re
re.sub("[^0-9a-zA-Z]",        # Anything except 0..9, a..z and A..Z
       "",                    # replaced with nothing
       "this is a test!!")    # in this string

--> 'thisisatest'