Best Way to Strip Punctuation from a String

Best way to strip punctuation from a string

From an efficiency perspective, you're not going to beat

s.translate(None, string.punctuation)

For higher versions of Python use the following code:

s.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation))

It's performing raw string operations in C with a lookup table - there's not much that will beat that but writing your own C code.

If speed isn't a worry, another option though is:

exclude = set(string.punctuation)
s = ''.join(ch for ch in s if ch not in exclude)

This is faster than s.replace with each char, but won't perform as well as non-pure python approaches such as regexes or string.translate, as you can see from the below timings. For this type of problem, doing it at as low a level as possible pays off.

Timing code:

import re, string, timeit

s = "string. With. Punctuation"
exclude = set(string.punctuation)
table = string.maketrans("","")
regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation))

def test_set(s):
    return ''.join(ch for ch in s if ch not in exclude)

def test_re(s):  # From Vinko's solution, with fix.
    return regex.sub('', s)

def test_trans(s):
    return s.translate(table, string.punctuation)

def test_repl(s):  # From S.Lott's solution
    for c in string.punctuation:
        s=s.replace(c,"")
    return s

print "sets      :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_set as f').timeit(1000000)
print "regex     :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_re as f').timeit(1000000)
print "translate :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_trans as f').timeit(1000000)
print "replace   :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_repl as f').timeit(1000000)

This gives the following results:

sets      : 19.8566138744
regex     : 6.86155414581
translate : 2.12455511093
replace   : 28.4436721802

How to remove all the punctuation in a string? (Python)

A really simple implementation is:

out = "".join(c for c in asking if c not in ('!','.',':'))

and keep adding any other types of punctuation.

A more efficient way would be

import string
stringIn = "string.with.punctuation!"
out = stringIn.translate(stringIn.maketrans("",""), string.punctuation)

Edit: There is some more discussion on efficiency and other implementations here:
Best way to strip punctuation from a string in Python

How to strip string from punctuation except apostrophes for NLP

>>> from string import punctuation
>>> type(punctuation)
<class 'str'>
>>> my_punctuation = punctuation.replace("'", "")
>>> my_punctuation
'!"#$%&()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'
>>> "It's right, isn't it?".translate(str.maketrans("", "", my_punctuation))
"It's right isn't it"

Is there a way to remove punctuation at the start and end of each word in string but not the middle? Python

This should do it for you.

from string import punctuation

a="""'?hello !mango! and, ban,ana yum apple!',  '?!,' """
new=[i.strip(punctuation) for i in a.split()]
print(" ".join(new))

output:

hello mango and ban,ana yum apple

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