python reading strings

Question

Can anyone help me with the following query what is the pythonic way to cleanse the following strings:

Lets say I have the word

"abcd

or

'blahblah

then the words actually are

abcd, blahblah

I can think of a basic way.. but actually I am reading a huge text file.. and explicitly writing a code to read char by char seems like overkill and definitely not pythonic.. I am sure there is a pythonic way to do this..:) Thanks

poke · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-01 16:52:57Z

2

You can strip unwanted characters from the beginning and end of a string using the str.strip() method.

>>> '"abcd'.strip( '"\'' )
'abcd'
>>> '\'blahblah'.strip( '"\'' )
'blahblah'
>>> print( '"abcd'.strip( '"\'' ) )
abcd
>>> print( '\'blahblah'.strip( '"\'' ) )
blahblah

edited Nov 1, 2011 at 16:52

answered Nov 1, 2011 at 16:45

poke

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2 Comments

frazman Over a year ago

and how do you strip down the single quotes in the start and the end..? Shouldnt the out put be like abcd and not 'abcd'

poke Over a year ago

No, it’s just in quotes because the return value itself is a string. If you print the value itself, you’ll see that there are no more quotes in the string. Changed my answer to show that.

Patrick Perini · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-01 16:53:16Z

1

Looks like you want just the alphabetical characters from each word.

import re
_regex = r'\W+' #word characters only    

#read in input
#split input on ' ' (space), to get words

for word in list_of_words:
    word = re.sub(_regex, '', word)

answered Nov 1, 2011 at 16:53

Patrick Perini

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