Question

i have a string like this

somestring='in this/ string / i have many. interesting.occurrences of {different chars} that need     to .be removed  '

here is the result i want:

somestring='in this string i have many interesting occurrences of different chars that need to be removed'

i started to manually do all kinds of .replace, but there are so many different combinations that i think there must be a simpler way. perhaps there’s a library that already does this?

does anyone know how i can clean up this string>?

Answer 1

I would use regular expression to replace all non-alphanumerics to spaces:

>>> import re
>>> somestring='in this/ string / i have many. interesting.occurrences of {different chars} that need     to .be removed  '
>>> rx = re.compile('\W+')
>>> res = rx.sub(' ', somestring).strip()
>>> res
'in this string i have many interesting occurrences of different chars that need to be removed'