Question

I want to remove any brackets from a string. Why doesn’t this work properly?

>>> name = "Barack (of Washington)"
>>> name = name.strip("(){}<>")
>>> print name
Barack (of Washington

Answer 1

I did a time test here, using each method 100000 times in a loop. The results surprised me. (The results still surprise me after editing them in response to valid criticism in the comments.)

Here’s the script:

import timeit

bad_chars = '(){}<>'

setup = """import re
import string
s = 'Barack (of Washington)'
bad_chars = '(){}<>'
rgx = re.compile('[%s]' % bad_chars)"""

timer = timeit.Timer('o = "".join(c for c in s if c not in bad_chars)', setup=setup)
print "List comprehension: ",  timer.timeit(100000)


timer = timeit.Timer("o= rgx.sub('', s)", setup=setup)
print "Regular expression: ", timer.timeit(100000)

timer = timeit.Timer('for c in bad_chars: s = s.replace(c, "")', setup=setup)
print "Replace in loop: ", timer.timeit(100000)

timer = timeit.Timer('s.translate(string.maketrans("", "", ), bad_chars)', setup=setup)
print "string.translate: ", timer.timeit(100000)

Here are the results:

List comprehension:  0.631745100021
Regular expression:  0.155561923981
Replace in loop:  0.235936164856
string.translate:  0.0965719223022

Results on other runs follow a similar pattern. If speed is not the primary concern, however, I still think string.translate is not the most readable; the other three are more obvious, though slower to varying degrees.