Removing unwanted characters from a string in Python

Question

Hi, I have some strings that I want to delete some unwanted characters from them. For example: Adam'sApple ----> AdamsApple.(case insensitive) Can someone help me, I need the fastest way to do it, cause I have a couple of millions of records that have to be polished. Thanks

Answer 1

One simple way:

>>> s = "Adam'sApple"
>>> x = s.replace("'", "")
>>> print x
'AdamsApple'

... or take a look at regex substitutions.

Answer 2

Try:

"Adam'sApple".replace("'", '')

One step further, to replace multiple characters with nothing:

import re
print re.sub(r'''['"x]''', '', '''a'"xb''')

Yields:

ab

Answer 3

str.replace("'","");

Answer 4

Any characters in the 2nd argument of the translate method are deleted:

>>> "Adam's Apple!".translate(None,"'!")
'Adams Apple'

NOTE: translate requires Python 2.6 or later to use None for the first argument, which otherwise must be a translation string of length 256. string.maketrans('','') can be used in place of None for pre-2.6 versions.