Python remove anything that is not a letter or number

In the char set matching rule [...] you can specify ^ as first char to mean “not in”

import re
re.sub("[^0-9a-zA-Z]",        # Anything except 0..9, a..z and A..Z
       "",                    # replaced with nothing
       "this is a test!!")    # in this string

--> 'thisisatest'

'W' is the same as [^A-Za-z0-9_] plus accented chars from your locale.

>>> re.sub('W', '', 'text 1, 2, 3...')
'text123'

Maybe you want to keep the spaces or have all the words (and numbers):

>>> re.findall('w+', 'my. text, --without-- (punctuation) 123')
['my', 'text', 'without', 'punctuation', '123']

you can use predefined regex in python : W corresponds to the set [^a-zA-Z0-9_]. Then,

import re
s = 'Hello dutrow 123'
re.sub('W', '', s)
--> 'Hellodutrow123'

There are other ways also you may consider e.g. simply loop thru string and skip unwanted chars e.g. assuming you want to delete all ascii chars which are not letter or digits

>>> newstring = [c for c in "a!1#b$2c%3tnx" if c in string.letters + string.digits]
>>> "".join(newstring)
'a1b2c3x'

or use string.translate to map one char to other or delete some chars e.g.

>>> todelete = [ chr(i) for i in range(256) if chr(i) not in string.letters + string.digits ]
>>> todelete = "".join(todelete)
>>> "a!1#b$2c%3tnx".translate(None, todelete)
'a1b2c3x'

this way you need to calculate todelete list once or todelete can be hard-coded once and use it everywhere you need to convert string

You need to be more specific:

1. What about Unicode “letters”? ie, those with diacriticals.
2. What about white space? (I assume this is what you DO want to delete along with punctuation)
3. When you say “letters” do you mean A-Z and a-z in ASCII only?
4. When you say “numbers” do you mean 0-9 only? What about decimals, separators and exponents?

It gets complex quickly…

A great place to start is an interactive regex site, such as RegExr

You can also get Python specific Python Regex Tool

Also you can try to use isalpha and isnumeric methods the following way:

text = 'base, sample test;'
getVals = lambda x: (c for c in text if c.isalpha() or c.isnumeric())
map(lambda word: ' '.join(getVals(word)): text.split(' '))