"W W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
Is there a faster way to strip punctuation from a string than this?
Yes
from string import ascii_letters
def strip_punctuation(mystring):
newstring = ''
for x in mystring:
if x in ascii_letters:
newstring += x
This is very slow since it creates a new string with each
addition, it doesn't just append a character at the end as
you might think! It would be faster to add the chars to a
list then use string join() at the end. But see below...
else:
pass
The else/pass is redundant you could remove it.
However, it's much easier to do a replacement operation and
especially using a regex of all the non ascii characters - or
whatever you define to be punctuation...
That way you can do a single operation on the entire
string which will all be coded in optimised C rather than
clunking through, letter by letter in Python.
HTH,
--
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld
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