How do I replace punctuation in a string in Python?

Question

I would like to replace (and not remove) all punctuation characters by " " in a string in Python.

Is there something efficient of the following flavour?

text = text.translate(string.maketrans("",""), string.punctuation) 

Answer 1

This answer is for Python 2 and will only work for ASCII strings:

The string module contains two things that will help you: a list of punctuation characters and the "maketrans" function. Here is how you can use them:

import string replace_punctuation = string.maketrans(string.punctuation, ' '*len(string.punctuation)) text = text.translate(replace_punctuation)