How to replace all those Special Characters with white spaces in python?

Question

How to replace all those special characters with white spaces in python ?

I have a list of names of a company . . .

Ex:-[myfiles.txt]

MY company.INC

Old Wine pvt

master-minds ltd

"apex-labs ltd"

"India-New corp"

Indo-American pvt/ltd

Here, as per the above example . . . I need all the special characters[-,",/,.] in the file myfiles.txt must be replaced with a single white space and saved into another text file myfiles1.txt.

Can anyone please help me out?

Answer 1

Assuming you mean to change everything non-alphanumeric, you can do this on the command line:

cat foo.txt | sed "s/[^A-Za-z0-99]/ /g" > bar.txt

Or in Python with the re module:

import re
original_string = open('foo.txt').read()
new_string = re.sub('[^a-zA-Z0-9\n\.]', ' ', original_string)
open('bar.txt', 'w').write(new_string)

Answer 2

import string

specials = '-"/.' #etc
trans = string.maketrans(specials, ' '*len(specials))
#for line in file
cleanline = line.translate(trans)

e.g.

>>> line = "Indo-American pvt/ltd"
>>> line.translate(trans)
'Indo American pvt ltd'