How to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

1. Use string Class Methods to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python
2. Use regex to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python
3. Use string.punctuation to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python
4. Use replace() to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

This tutorial discusses methods to strip punctuation from a string in Python. It is a specifically useful step in preprocessing and cleaning textual data for NLP.

Use string Class Methods to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

We can use the built-in functions provided in the String class to strip punctuation from a string in Python.

str.maketrans creates a translation table containing the mapping between two characters. In this case, we want to remove all the punctuations, hence str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation) creates mapping from empty string to empty string, and punctuations to None.

The translate method applies these mappings to the given string thereby removing the punctuations. The below example illustrates this.

s = "string. With. Punctuations!?"
out = s.translate(str.maketrans("", "", string.punctuation))
print(out)

Output:

'string With Punctuations'

The above method removes all the punctuations from a given input string.

Use regex to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

We can also use regex to strip punctuation from a string in Python. The regex pattern [^\w\s] captures everything which is not a word or whitespace(i.e. the punctuations) and replaces it with an empty string. The below example illustrates this.

import re

s = "string. With. Punctuation?"
out = re.sub(r"[^\w\s]", "", s)
print(out)

Output:

'string With Punctuations'

Use string.punctuation to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

It is similar to the first method discussed. string.punctuation contains all the characters considered punctuation in English. We can use this list and exclude all the punctuations from a string. The below example illustrates this.

s = "string. With. Punctuation?"

out = "".join([i for i in s if i not in string.punctuation])
print(out)

Output:

'string With Punctuations'

Use replace() to Strip Punctuation From a String in Python

We can also use replace() to strip out punctuation from a string in Python. Again, we use string.punctuation to define a list of punctuations and then replace all the punctuations with an empty string to strip out the punctuations. The below example illustrates this.

s = "string. With. Punctuation?"

punct = string.punctuation
for c in punct:
    s = s.replace(c, "")
print(s)

Output:

'string With Punctuations'