How to remove all special characters except spaces and dashes from a Python string?

Question

I want to strip all special characters from a Python string, except dashes and spaces.

Is this correct?

import re my_string = "Web's GReat thing-ok" pattern = re.compile('[^A-Za-z0-9 -]') new_string = pattern.sub('',my_string) new_string >> 'Webs GReat thing-ok' # then make it lowercase and replace spaces with underscores # new_string = new_string.lower().replace (" ", "_") # new_string # >> 'webs_great_thing-ok'

As shown, I ultimately want to replace the spaces with underscores after removing the other special characters, but figured I would do it in stages. Is there a Pythonic way to do it all in one fell swoop?

For context, I am using this input for MongoDB collection names, so want the constraint of the final string to be: alphanumeric with dashes and underscores allowed.

DeepSpace · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-15 07:35:15Z

You are actually trying to "slugify" your string.

If you don't mind using a 3rd party (and a Python 2 specific) library you can use slugify (pip install slugify):

import slugify string = "Web's GReat thing-ok" print slugify.slugify(string) >> 'webs_great_thing-ok'

You can implement it yourself. All of slugify's code is

import re import unicodedata def slugify(string): return re.sub(r'[-\s]+', '-', unicode( re.sub(r'[^\w\s-]', '', unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', string) .encode('ascii', 'ignore')) .strip() .lower())

Note that this is Python 2 specific.

Going back to your example, You can make it a one-liner. Whether it is Pythonic enough is up to you to decide (note the shortened range A-z instead of A-Za-z):

import re my_string = "Web's GReat thing-ok" new_string = re.sub('[^A-z0-9 -]', '', my_string).lower().replace(" ", "_")

UPDATE There seems to be more robust and Python 3 compatible "slugify" library here.

Burhan Khalid · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-15 07:35:15Z

A one-liner, as requested:

>>> import re, unicodedata >>> value = "Web's GReat thing-ok" >>> re.sub('[\s]+', '_', re.sub('[^\w\s-]', '', unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', unicode(value)).encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii')).strip().lower()) u'webs_great_thing-ok'

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