Python: Strip everything but spaces and alphanumeric

Question

I have a large string with brackets and commas and such. I want to strip all those characters but keep the spacing. How can I do this. As of now I am using

strippedList = re.sub(r'\W+', '', origList)

Answer 1

re.sub(r'([^\s\w]|_)+', '', origList)

Answer 2

The regular-expression based versions might be faster (especially if you switch to using a compiled expression), but I like this for clarity:

"".join([c for c in origList if c in string.letters or c in string.whitespace])

It's a bit weird with the join() call, but I think that is pretty idiomatic Python for converting a list of characters into a string.

Answer 3

Demonstrating what characters you will get in the result:

>>> s = ''.join(chr(i) for i in range(256)) # all possible bytes
>>> re.sub(r'[^\s\w_]+','',s) # What will remain
'\t\n\x0b\x0c\r 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

Docs: re.sub, Regex HOWTO: Matching Characters, Regex HOWTO: Repeating Things