CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.x
John Sean
John Sean

Reputation: 37

How to remove punctuation in Python without leaving a space

I want to remove certain punctuations from a text. I was able to remove my desired characters but it keep leaving a space instead of the character.

In { ) other news tonight,
a Constitutional { | / !! amendment

I have a text such as above and when I process it it becomes

In   other news tonight,
a Constitutional    !! amendment

Instead of 

In other news tonight,
a Constitutional !! amendment

Below is the code I have

for line in lines:
    exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
    line = ''.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in exclude)

How do I remove empty spaces that are being produced?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 868

Answers (2)

blhsing
blhsing

Reputation: 106512

You can split the string with the str.split method so that multiple spaces are treated as one, and then join the resulting list back into a string by a space:

exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
for line in lines:
    line = ' '.join(''.join(' ' if ch in exclude else ch for ch in line).split())

Upvotes: 0

Theo
Theo

Reputation: 623

No empty spaces are being created. Your string already has empty spaces between these characters. Removing those characters will not remove the spaces in between them. One potential solution is that I assume you want to remove any areas with more than one consecutive space. Replace your code with:

exclude = set('"#$%&\()*+-/:<=>@[\\]^_`{|}')
for line in lines:
    line = ''.join(ch for ch in line if ch not in exclude)
    line = ' '.join(line.split())

Which will remove all double spaces.

Upvotes: 1

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