Remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from string

Question

I need to remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from a string so that I only have letters and numbers.

Answer 1

This can be done without regex:

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323" >>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum()) 'Specialcharactersspaces888323' 

You can use str.isalnum:

S.isalnum() -> bool  Return True if all characters in S are alphanumeric and there is at least one character in S, False otherwise. 

If you insist on using regex, other solutions will do fine. However note that if it can be done without using a regular expression, that's the best way to go about it.