In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove non-alphanumeric characters from a string in Python with the help of some examples.
What are alphanumeric characters?
A character is an alphanumeric character if it’s either an alphabet (a to z, A to Z) or a digit (0 to 9). For example, the string striker123 contains only alphanumeric characters whereas the string striker_123 contains one non-alphanumeric character ('_').
You can use the string isalnum() function to check if a character is an alphanumeric character or not.
# check if character is alphanumeric
print('a'.isalnum())
print('A'.isalnum())
print('7'.isalnum())
print('_'.isalnum())
print('#'.isalnum())
Output:
True True True False False
Removing non alphanumeric characters from a string is commonly used as a text preprocessing step. Let’s now look at how to remove non alphanumeric characters from a string with the help of some examples.
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There are a number of ways you can remove non alphanumeric characters from a string in Python.
Using string isalnum() and string join() functions
You can use the string isalnum() function along with the string join() function to create a string with only alphanumeric characters.
# string with non alphanumeric characters s = "Striker@#$_123" # remove non alphanuemeric characters new_s = ''.join(c for c in s if c.isalnum()) print(new_s)
Output:
Striker123
You can see that the resulting string doesn’t have any non alphanumeric characters. Here we iterate over all the characters in the original string and keep it only if it’s an alphanumeric character which we check using the string isalnum() function. We then use the string join() function to concatenate each character.
Using regular expression to remove non alphanumeric characters
We can also use regular expressions to remove such characters. For example, we can write a regular expression to match with all the non-alphanumeric characters in the string and then replace them with an empty string. You can use the re library in Python to implement regular expression pattern matching.
import re # string with non alphanumeric characters s = "Striker@#$_123" # remove non alphanuemeric characters new_s = re.sub(r'[^a-zA-Z0-9]', '', s) print(new_s)
Output:
Striker123
We get the same result as above.
For more on regular expressions in Python, refer to this guide.
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