Is there a way to remove all characters except letters in a string in Python?

Question

I call a function that returns code with all kinds of characters ranging from ( to “, and , and numbers.

Is there an elegant way to remove all of these so I end up with nothing but letters?

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Answer 1

Given

s = '@#24A-09=wes()&8973o**_##me'  # contains letters 'Awesome'

You can filter out non-alpha characters with a generator expression:

result = ''.join(c for c in s if c.isalpha())

Or filter with filter:

result = ''.join(filter(str.isalpha, s))

Or you can substitute non-alpha with blanks using re.sub:

import re
result = re.sub(r'[^A-Za-z]', '', s)

Answered By: Steven Rumbalski

Answer 2

Here’s another one, using string.ascii_letters

>>> import string
>>> "".join(x for x in s if x in string.ascii_letters)

`

Answered By: msvalkon

Answer 3

A solution using RegExes is quite easy here:

import re
newstring = re.sub(r"[^a-zA-Z]+", "", string)

Where string is your string and newstring is the string without characters that are not alphabetic. What this does is replace every character that is not a letter by an empty string, thereby removing it. Note however that a RegEx may be slightly overkill here.

A more functional approach would be:

newstring = "".join(filter(str.isalpha, string))

Unfortunately you can’t just call stron a filterobject to turn it into a string, that would look much nicer…
Going the pythonic way it would be

newstring = "".join(c for c in string if c.isalpha())

Answered By: Cu3PO42

Answer 4

>>> import re
>>> string = "';''';;';1123123!@#!@#!#!$!sd         sds2312313~~"~s__"
>>> re.sub("[Wd_]", "", string)
'sdsdss'

Answered By: Sayan Chowdhury

Answer 5

You didn’t mention you want only english letters, here’s an international solution:

import unicodedata

str = u"hello, ѱϘяԼϷ!"
print ''.join(c for c in str if unicodedata.category(c).startswith('L'))

Answered By: gog

Answer 6

s = '@#24A-09=wes()&8973o**_##me'

print(filter(str.isalpha, s))

# Awesome

About return value of filter:

filter(function or None, sequence) -> list, tuple, or string

Answered By: Omid Raha

Answer 7

Well, I use this for myself in this kind of situations

Sorry, if it’s outdated 🙂

string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!"
alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

def letters_only(source):
    result = ""
    for i in source.lower():
        if i in alphabet:
            result += i
    return result

print(letters_only(string))

Answered By: LiquiD.S1nn3r

Is there a way to remove all characters except letters in a string in Python?

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