How do I replace punctuation in a string in Python?

Question

I would like to replace (and not remove) all punctuation characters by " " in a string in Python.

Is there something efficient of the following flavour?

text = text.translate(string.maketrans("",""), string.punctuation)

possible duplicate of [Best way to strip punctuation from a string in Python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/265960/best-way-to-strip-punctuation-from-a-string-in-python) — Martijn Pieters, Sep 15 '12 at 13:22
what's the difference between REMOVE vs REPLACE with nothing?? — wroniasty, Sep 15 '12 at 13:23

score 49 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 15 '12 at 13:23

49

This answer is for Python 2 and will only work for ASCII strings:

The string module contains two things that will help you: a list of punctuation characters and the "maketrans" function. Here is how you can use them:

import string
replace_punctuation = string.maketrans(string.punctuation, ' '*len(string.punctuation))
text = text.translate(replace_punctuation)

answered Sep 15 '12 at 13:23

Benji York

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This is the fastest solution, easily beating the regular expression option. – Martijn Pieters Sep 15 '12 at 13:26
By far the best answer - fast and complete. :-) – ProfVersaggi Jan 13 '16 at 18:48
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in python 3 use the following: str.translate() https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.translate – jasonleonhard Apr 29 '17 at 01:47

score 21 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

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Modified solution from Best way to strip punctuation from a string in Python

import string
import re

regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation))
out = regex.sub(' ', "This is, fortunately. A Test! string")
# out = 'This is  fortunately  A Test  string'

edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

Community

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answered Sep 15 '12 at 13:21

Gregor

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How would you keep apostrophes, for example in the word don't? I don't want the apostrophes stripped out so that I am left with dont. – Chris Nielsen Mar 03 '17 at 03:48
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You can remove the apostrophe from string.punctuation (which is in turn just a string containing all punctuation characters). `string.punctuation.replace("'", "")` leads to ` '!"#$%&()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'` – Gregor Mar 03 '17 at 08:17

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 23 '18 at 14:41

This workaround works in python 3:

import string
ex_str = 'SFDF-OIU .df  !hello.dfasf  sad - - d-f - sd'
#because len(string.punctuation) = 32
table = str.maketrans(string.punctuation,' '*32) 
res = ex_str.translate(table)

# res = 'SFDF OIU  df   hello dfasf  sad     d f   sd'

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 02 '18 at 14:12

There is a more robust solution which relies on a regex exclusion rather than inclusion through an extensive list of punctuation characters.

import re
print(re.sub('[^\w\s]', '', 'This is, fortunately. A Test! string'))
#Output - 'This is fortunately A Test string'

The regex catches anything which is not an alpha-numeric or whitespace character

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited Jul 15 '18 at 08:06

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Replace by ''?.

What's the difference between translating all ; into '' and remove all ;?

Here is to remove all ;:

s = 'dsda;;dsd;sad'
table = string.maketrans('','')
string.translate(s, table, ';')

And you can do your replacement with translate.

edited Jul 15 '18 at 08:06

Peter Mortensen

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answered Sep 15 '12 at 13:24

rpbear

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score 0 · Answer 6 · edited Jul 15 '18 at 08:09

In my specific way, I removed "+" and "&" from the punctuation list:

all_punctuations = string.punctuation
selected_punctuations = re.sub(r'(\&|\+)', "", all_punctuations)
print selected_punctuations

str = "he+llo* ithis& place% if you * here @@"
punctuation_regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(selected_punctuations))
punc_free = punctuation_regex.sub("", str)
print punc_free

Result: he+llo ithis& place if you here

How do I replace punctuation in a string in Python?

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