Why is this regex not removing '\' and '-'?

Question

I'm trying to remove backslashes and hyphens from text using a regular expression to match for characters to remove.

SPL_CHAR2 = r"[,(.;)@\#?\|!-+_*=~<>/&$]+"

def remove_special_chars(text: str) -> str:
    text = re.sub(SPL_CHAR2, ' ', text)
    return text

The issue is that these characters are not being removed.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 08 '19 at 18:03

Those characters have special meaning in the regex definition. To make this work, rearrange the character set like so:

SPL_CHAR2 = r"[-,(.;)@\#?\\|!+_*=~<>/&$]+"

I've moved the dash to the start (so that it's no longer defining a character range) and have doubled the backslash.

Instead of moving the dash to the start, you can keep it where it is but add a backslash right before it.

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