Python - keep only alphanumeric and space, and ignore non-ASCII

Question

I have this line to remove all non-alphanumeric characters except spaces

re.sub(r'\W+', '', s)

Although, it still keeps non-English characters.

For example if I have

re.sub(r'\W+', '', 'This is a sentence, and here are non-english 托利 苏 !!11')

I want to get as output:

> 'This is a sentence and here are non-english  11'

Answer 1

re.sub(r'[^A-Za-z0-9 ]+', '', s)

(Edit) To clarify: The [] create a list of chars. The ^ negates the list. A-Za-z are the English alphabet and is space. For any one or more of these (that is, anything that is not A-Z, a-z, or space,) replace with the empty string.

Answer 2

This might not be an answer to this concrete question but i came across this thread during my research.

I wanted to reach the same objective as the questioner but I wanted to include non English characters such as: ä,ü,ß, ...

The way the questioners code works, spaces will be deleted too.

A simple workaround is the following:

re.sub(r'[^ \w+]', '', string)

The ^ implies that everything but the following is selected. In this case \w, thus every word character (including non-English), and spaces.

I hope this will help someone in the future