how to remove special characters from a string in python

Remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from string

stackoverflow.com › questions › 5843518 › remove-all-special-characters-punctuation-and-spaces-from-string

This can be done without regex:

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
>>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum())
'Specialcharactersspaces888323'

You can use str.isalnum:

S.isalnum() -> bool

Return True if all characters in S are alphanumeric
and there is at least one character in S, False otherwise.

If you insist on using regex, other solutions will do fine. However note that if it can be done without using a regular expression, that's the best way to go about it.

Answer from user225312 on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 5843518 › remove-all-special-characters-punctuation-and-spaces-from-string

python - Remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from string - Stack Overflow

Top answer

1 of 16

570

This can be done without regex:

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
>>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum())
'Specialcharactersspaces888323'

You can use str.isalnum:

S.isalnum() -> bool

Return True if all characters in S are alphanumeric
and there is at least one character in S, False otherwise.

If you insist on using regex, other solutions will do fine. However note that if it can be done without using a regular expression, that's the best way to go about it.

2 of 16

410

Here is a regex to match a string of characters that are not a letters or numbers:

[^A-Za-z0-9]+

Here is the Python command to do a regex substitution:

re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9]+', '', mystring)

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GeeksforGeeks

geeksforgeeks.org › python › python-removing-unwanted-characters-from-string

Remove Special Characters from String in Python - GeeksforGeeks

July 11, 2025 - re.sub() function from re module allows you to substitute parts of a string based on a regex pattern. By using a pattern like [^a-zA-Z0-9], we can match and remove all non-alphanumeric characters.

Discussions

How do I remove remove stuff like (. , ' *) from a string?

You can use isalnum() to remove special characters. The string method .isalnum() returns True or False if a string is all alphanumeric characters. With this we can write a comprehension that loops over the characters in the string and only keep the alphanumeric characters. I think the regex method is more efficient, especially for really big strings, but you have to know all the characters you want to remove, with isalnum you don't. On the flipside you don't have to add another import if you use isalnum. So it depends on the situation for which method you should choose (re vs isalnum). s = "Bob 'hit' a ball, the hit BALL flew far after it was hit." # Remove all special characters unless it is a space # Replace "hit" with "sample" new_s = "".join(char for char in s if char.isalnum() or char == " ").replace("hit", "sample") print(new_s) >>>Bob sample a ball the sample BALL flew far after it was sample More on reddit.com

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August 6, 2021

delete all special characters at start and end of string

If you just need to remove single quotes from start/end of string, you can use s.strip("'") If you want to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from start/end, try re.sub(r'\A[^a-z\d]+|[^a-z\d]+\Z', '', s, flags=re.I) More on reddit.com

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How to remove all special characters from an input, and accents?

try importing punctuations from string module which will contain most of the specials, then you can split your string in a list compression or for loop over all the chars and choose all the required chars with desired condition in a list and then join them for example: from string import punctuations a = "hello!" l1 = [] for x in a: if x not in punctuations: list1.append(x) and then you can use join method to make a str More on reddit.com

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What you want to do is remove the prefix. Your prefix is 31 chars >>> len("The.Simpsons.The.Simpsons.clear") 31 >>> t="The.Simpsons.The.Simpsons.clearThe.SimpsonsSeason 1 EP7 The Call of the Simpsons.mkv" >>> t[31:] 'The.SimpsonsSeason 1 EP7 The Call of the Simpsons.mkv' A bit of advice: before you do something permanent like renaming files, print out new names just to make sure they look ok. More on reddit.com

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