Remove Special Characters From a String in Python

John on March 21, 2022

This tutorial will cover the different ways of removing special characters from a string in Python.

Remove Special Characters from a String Using the str.isalnum() Method

The str.isalnum() method returns True if the character supplied is alphanumeric. Knowing that we can build a new string without special characters like this:

string = 'Hello#- World!'

new_string = ''.join(char for char in string if char.isalnum())
print(new_string)

HelloWorld

In the above example, we iterate over the string with a for loop and return the character if it is alphanumeric before adding it to a new string using the .join() method.

Remove Special Characters from a String Using re.sub() Method

The re.sub() function can remove special characters from a when using regex grouping like this:

import re

string = 'Hello#- World!'

new_string = re.sub(r"[^a-zA-Z0-9]","",string)

print(new_string)

HelloWorld