collapsing whitespace in a string

Question

I have a string that kind of looks like this:

\"stuff   .  // : /// more-stuff .. .. ...$%$% stuff -> DD\"

and I want to strip off all p

Answer 1

Here's a single-step approach (but the uppercasing actually uses a string method -- much simpler!):

rex = re.compile(r'\W+')
result = rex.sub(' ', strarg).upper()

where strarg is the string argument (don't use names that shadow builtins or standard library modules, please).