Best way to strip punctuation from a string

From an efficiency perspective, you're not going to beat

s.translate(None, string.punctuation)

For higher versions of Python use the following code:

s.translate(str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation))

It's performing raw string operations in C with a lookup table - there's not much that will beat that but writing your own C code.

If speed isn't a worry, another option though is:

exclude = set(string.punctuation)s = ''.join(ch for ch in s if ch not in exclude)

This is faster than s.replace with each char, but won't perform as well as non-pure python approaches such as regexes or string.translate, as you can see from the below timings. For this type of problem, doing it at as low a level as possible pays off.

Timing code:

import re, string, timeits = "string. With. Punctuation"exclude = set(string.punctuation)table = string.maketrans("","")regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation))def test_set(s):    return ''.join(ch for ch in s if ch not in exclude)def test_re(s):  # From Vinko's solution, with fix.    return regex.sub('', s)def test_trans(s):    return s.translate(table, string.punctuation)def test_repl(s):  # From S.Lott's solution    for c in string.punctuation:        s=s.replace(c,"")    return sprint "sets      :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_set as f').timeit(1000000)print "regex     :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_re as f').timeit(1000000)print "translate :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_trans as f').timeit(1000000)print "replace   :",timeit.Timer('f(s)', 'from __main__ import s,test_repl as f').timeit(1000000)

This gives the following results:

sets      : 19.8566138744regex     : 6.86155414581translate : 2.12455511093replace   : 28.4436721802

Regular expressions are simple enough, if you know them.

import res = "string. With. Punctuation?"s = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]','',s)

For the convenience of usage, I sum up the note of striping punctuation from a string in both Python 2 and Python 3. Please refer to other answers for the detailed description.

Python 2

import strings = "string. With. Punctuation?"table = string.maketrans("","")new_s = s.translate(table, string.punctuation)      # Output: string without punctuation

Python 3

import strings = "string. With. Punctuation?"table = str.maketrans(dict.fromkeys(string.punctuation))  # OR {key: None for key in string.punctuation}new_s = s.translate(table)                          # Output: string without punctuation