strip punctuation with regex - python

Question

I need to use regex to strip punctuation at the start and end of a word. It seems like regex would be the best option for this. I don't want punctuation removed from words like 'you're', which is why I'm not using .replace().

Answer 1

You don't need regular expression to do this task. Use str.strip with string.punctuation:

>>> import string
>>> string.punctuation
'!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~'
>>> '!Hello.'.strip(string.punctuation)
'Hello'

>>> ' '.join(word.strip(string.punctuation) for word in "Hello, world. I'm a boy, you're a girl.".split())
"Hello world I'm a boy you're a girl"