How to remove punctuation in Python without leaving a space

Question

I want to remove certain punctuations from a text. I was able to remove my desired characters but it keep leaving a space instead of the character.

In { ) other news tonight,
a Constitutional { | / !! amendment

I have a text such as above and when I process it it becomes

In   other news tonight,
a Constitutional    !! amendment

Instead of

In other news tonight,
a Constitutional !! amendment

Below is the code I have

for line in lines:
    exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
    line = ''.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in exclude)

How do I remove empty spaces that are being produced?

Benchmarks on multiple string replacements - https://stackoverflow.com/a/27086669/4180176 — Joshua Nixon, Apr 02 '20 at 19:28

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 02 '20 at 19:23

1

No empty spaces are being created. Your string already has empty spaces between these characters. Removing those characters will not remove the spaces in between them. One potential solution is that I assume you want to remove any areas with more than one consecutive space. Replace your code with:

exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
for line in lines:
    line = ''.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in exclude)
    line = ' '.join(line.split())

Which will remove all double spaces.

answered Apr 02 '20 at 19:23

Theo

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So one problem with that is that "18-year-old" becomes "18yearold". But I want it to bed "18 year old" – John Sean Apr 02 '20 at 19:51
@JohnSean Then remove the dash from your excluded character and maybe make a new list which is characters to be replaced by spaces. Then in between the two joins add line = ' '.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in spacereplace) – Theo Apr 02 '20 at 19:52

blhsing · Answer 2 · 2020-04-02T20:22:34.233

0

You can split the string with the str.split method so that multiple spaces are treated as one, and then join the resulting list back into a string by a space:

exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
for line in lines:
    line = ' '.join(''.join(' ' if ch in exclude else ch for ch in line).split())

edited Apr 02 '20 at 20:22

answered Apr 02 '20 at 19:24

blhsing

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So one problem with that is that "18-year-old" becomes "18yearold". But I want it to bed "18 year old" – John Sean Apr 02 '20 at 19:51
Oops. Fixed then. – blhsing Apr 02 '20 at 20:08
I got ```1 8 y e a r o l d L o o k , W i l l , w e ' r e a l m o s t t h e r e .``` – John Sean Apr 02 '20 at 20:20
Oops. Fixed again. – blhsing Apr 02 '20 at 20:22

How to remove punctuation in Python without leaving a space

2 Answers2