Remove all special characters punctuation and spaces from string

Question

I need to remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from a string so that I only have letters and numbers.

Answer 1

This can be done without regex:

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
>>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum())
'Specialcharactersspaces888323'

You can use str.isalnum:

S.isalnum() -> bool

Return True if all characters in S are alphanumeric
and there is at least one character in S, False otherwise.