Remove Brackets and Parentheses from string in Python

Question

I have a string like this

string = 'LVPV(filler)PITN(notneeded)ATLDQITGK[0;0;0;0;0;6;2;0;0;5;0]'

How do I remove everything in the brackets and parentheses? Like so:

string = 'LVPVPITNATLDQITGK'

Answer 1

Regular expression is ideal for these tasks and fortunately python standard library provides support for regex

>>> re.sub(r"[\(\[].*?[\)\]]", "", st)
'LVPVPITNATLDQITGK'

The above pattern substitutes with empty string any thing that is within a parenthesis or bracket block.

Note Regex patterns are difficult to make robust and can easily digress and break for exceptional patterns like

'LVPV(filler]PITN[notneeded)ATLDQITGK[0;0;0;0;0;6;2;0;0;5;0]'

So you need to be certain about your input data and its expected output

And nevertheless, you can always do this without regex

>>> import string
>>> ''.join(st.translate(string.maketrans("()[]"," "*4)).split(' ')[::2])
'LVPVPITNATLDQITGK'

Answer 2

I suggest you to use alternation operator.

>>> string = 'LVPV(filler)PITN(notneeded)ATLDQITGK[0;0;0;0;0;6;2;0;0;5;0]'
>>> re.sub(r"\([^()]*\)|\[[^\[\]]*\]", "", string)
'LVPVPITNATLDQITGK'
>>> st = 'LVPV(filler]PITN[notneeded)ATLDQITGK[0;0;0;0;0;6;2;0;0;5;0]'
>>> re.sub(r"\([^()]*\)|\[[^\[\]]*\]", "", st)
'LVPVATLDQITGK'