Removing everything except letters and spaces from string in Python3.3

python regex python-3.3 translate
Gronk picture Gronk · Feb 4, 2014 · Viewed 21.6k times · Source

I have this example string: happy t00 go 129.129 and I want to keep only the spaces and letters. All I have been able to come up with so far that is pretty efficient is:

print(re.sub("\d", "", 'happy t00 go 129.129'.replace('.', '')))

but it is only specific to my example string. How can remove all characters other than letters and spaces?

Answer

inspectorG4dget picture inspectorG4dget · Feb 4, 2014 
whitelist = set('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
myStr = "happy t00 go 129.129$%^&*("
answer = ''.join(filter(whitelist.__contains__, myStr))

Output:

>>> answer
'happy t go '

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