What is the best way to strip all non alphanumeric characters from a string, using Python?
The solutions presented in the PHP variant of this question will probably work with some minor adjustments, but don't seem very 'pythonic' to me.
For the record, I don't just want to strip periods and commas (and other punctuation), but also quotes, brackets, etc.
I just timed some functions out of curiosity. In these tests I'm removing non-alphanumeric characters from the string string.printable (part of the built-in string module). The use of compiled '[\W_]+' and pattern.sub('', str) was found to be fastest.
$ python -m timeit -s \
"import string" \
"''.join(ch for ch in string.printable if ch.isalnum())"
10000 loops, best of 3: 57.6 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s \
"import string" \
"filter(str.isalnum, string.printable)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 37.9 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s \
"import re, string" \
"re.sub('[\W_]', '', string.printable)"
10000 loops, best of 3: 27.5 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s \
"import re, string" \
"re.sub('[\W_]+', '', string.printable)"
100000 loops, best of 3: 15 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit -s \
"import re, string; pattern = re.compile('[\W_]+')" \
"pattern.sub('', string.printable)"
100000 loops, best of 3: 11.2 usec per loop