How do I strip all leading and trailing punctuation in Python?

Question

I know how to remove all the punctuation in a string.

import string

s = '.$ABC-799-99,#'

table = string.maketrans("","") # to remove punctuation
new_s = s.translate(table, string.punctuation)

print(new_s)
# Output
ABC79999

How do I strip all leading and trailing punctuation in Python? The desired result of '.$ABC-799-99,#' is 'ABC-799-99'.

I Googled your question's title and the linked duplicate was the very first result, with the exact solution you're looking for. Please do more research in the future. — TigerhawkT3, May 14 '16 at 02:28
I do find it odd that the older question has 0 upvotes and this duplicate got 7, though. Oh well. — TigerhawkT3, May 14 '16 at 02:34
@TigerhawkT3, it might be related to keywords. A possible reason is that `leading` or `trailing` is more common than `starting` in such a context. — SparkAndShine, May 14 '16 at 02:36

score 36 · Accepted Answer · answered May 14 '16 at 00:52

36

You do exactly what you mention in your question, you just str.strip it.

from string import punctuation
s = '.$ABC-799-99,#'

print(s.strip(punctuation))

Output:

 ABC-799-99

str.strip can take multiple characters to remove.

If you just wanted to remove leading punctuation you could str.lstrip:

s.lstrip(punctuation)

Or rstrip any trailing punctuation:

 s.rstrip(punctuation)

answered May 14 '16 at 00:52

Padraic Cunningham

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Thx. If I'd keep `$`, `s.strip(string.punctuation.replace('$', ''))`, is it a better way? – SparkAndShine May 14 '16 at 00:58
1

@sparkandshine, no worries,i think `.punctuation.replace('$', '')` is pretty good, the other option is manually creating a string of punctuation characters minus $ and using that which I think would be a lot more arduous. – Padraic Cunningham May 14 '16 at 01:01

How do I strip all leading and trailing punctuation in Python?

1 Answers1