Removing Punctuation From Python List Items

Question

I have a list like

['hello', '...', 'h3.a', 'ds4,']

this should turn into

['hello', 'h3a', 'ds4']

and i want to remove only the punctuation leaving the letters and numbers intact. Punctuation is anything in the string.punctuation constant. I know that this is gunna be simple but im kinda noobie at python so...

Thanks, giodamelio

Answer 1

Assuming that your initial list is stored in a variable x, you can use this:

>>> x = [''.join(c for c in s if c not in string.punctuation) for s in x]
>>> print(x)
['hello', '', 'h3a', 'ds4']

To remove the empty strings:

>>> x = [s for s in x if s]
>>> print(x)
['hello', 'h3a', 'ds4']

Answer 2

Use string.translate:

>>> import string
>>> test_case = ['hello', '...', 'h3.a', 'ds4,']
>>> [s.translate(None, string.punctuation) for s in test_case]
['hello', '', 'h3a', 'ds4']

For the documentation of translate, see http://docs.python.org/library/string.html