python reading strings

Question

Can anyone help me with the following query what is the pythonic way to cleanse the following strings:

Lets say I have the word

"abcd   

or

'blahblah

then the words actually are

abcd, blahblah

I can think of a basic way.. but actually I am reading a huge text file.. and explicitly writing a code to read char by char seems like overkill and definitely not pythonic.. I am sure there is a pythonic way to do this..:) Thanks

Answer 1

Looks like you want just the alphabetical characters from each word.

import re
_regex = r'\W+' #word characters only    

#read in input
#split input on ' ' (space), to get words

for word in list_of_words:
    word = re.sub(_regex, '', word)

Answer 2

You can strip unwanted characters from the beginning and end of a string using the str.strip() method.

>>> '"abcd'.strip( '"\'' )
'abcd'
>>> '\'blahblah'.strip( '"\'' )
'blahblah'
>>> print( '"abcd'.strip( '"\'' ) )
abcd
>>> print( '\'blahblah'.strip( '"\'' ) )
blahblah