Python: Excluding spaces from regex

Question

How do I exclude spaces from regex, but will not ignore on special characters. My current code is:-

pattern=re.compile("[^\w]")
var = pattern.sub('', var)

I know \w will remove all whitespace characters, but how to exclude space only?

Example:

var = "hi this is test!@#$%%^^"

after regex it will become:

var = "hi this is test"

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to do, but \w matches word characters. — murgatroid99
– murgatroid99, Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 4:37
Are you just trying to remove those characters from the string or possibly others too? — squiguy
– squiguy, Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 4:48

Patricio Molina · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-04 04:44:53Z

5

[^a-zA-Z\d\s]

That removes everything, leaving letters, numbers and spaces.

answered Mar 4, 2013 at 4:44

Patricio Molina

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2 Comments

eyquem Over a year ago

@Natsume \s means not only the blanks but all characters '\f\r\n\t\v\x' too, so if you exclude them from the substitution, they remain in the string. Is it what you want ?

John Sherwood Over a year ago

@Natsume - Wouldn't [^\w ] (note the space after the w) accomplish this more succinctly? The space was the only thing that you were missing, unless all of the other whitespace characters mentioned by @eyquem are also intended to be valid.

Explosion Pills · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-04 04:37:27Z

0

Why not just re.compile('\s')?

answered Mar 4, 2013 at 4:37

Explosion Pills

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2 Comments

Natsume Over a year ago

nah it removes everything, from var = "this is test !@#" to var = " "

John Sherwood Over a year ago

Seems like all this would do would be to remove the whitespace, which is quite the opposite of what Natsume requested. If he replaces all whitespace characters with empty strings, it leaves all of the special characters he wants to remove and removes all of the spaces he wants to keep.

John Sherwood · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-04 05:32:44Z

0

If I'm understanding you right, you'd like to remove all characters not a word character or the spaces that separate them. If that is right, then it seems like the following would do the trick:

var = "hi this is test!@#$%%^^"
pattern=re.compile("[^\w ]")
var = pattern.sub('', var)

The only change here is that I've added a space after the ^\w inside the square brackets. When I run this, I get the following result:

>>> print var
hi this is test

answered Mar 4, 2013 at 5:32

John Sherwood

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