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

Do you have to use regular expressions? Do you feel you must do it in one line?

>>> import string
>>> s = "stuff   .  // : /// more-stuff .. .. ...$%$% stuff -> DD"
>>> s2 = ''.join(c for c in s if c in string.letters + ' ')
>>> ' '.join(s2.split())
'stuff morestuff stuff DD'