Regular expression to remove special characters from start or end of a string

Question

I want to remove special characters from start or end of string,

@Can't&

Using regular expression and I've tired,

`[^\w\s]`

But this regular expression removes ' which is inside the word and return below word,

Cant 

Can't seem to wrap my head around this any ideas would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Can be simplified like this:

  res = re.sub(r'^\W+|\W+$', '', txt)

Answer 2

Use the following approach (using regex alternation ..|.. ):

import re

s = "@Can't&"
res = re.sub(r'^[^\w\s]+|[^\w\s]+$', '', s)
print(res)    # Can't

Answer 3

You could just add an exception for ' in the expression:

[^\w\s']