I want to remove all special characters from a multi line string using strip() and string comprehension method in python

Question

zenPython = ''' The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. '''

words=[]
words= zenPython.split('.',',','*')
print(words)

Answer 1

You can simply use words = zenPython.replace('.', '').replace(',', '').replace('-', '').split(' ')

The strip() method only removes the leading and trailing characters of your string.

Answer 2

Two ways work

1. string method - create a table with all special characters and translate them into space, then split.

table = {i:32 for i in range(1, 65)}
table.update({i:32 for i in range(91,97)})
table.update({i:32 for i in range(123,256)})
word_list = zenPython.translate(table).split()

2. regular expression

import re
word_list = re.findall('[a-zA-Z]+', zenPython)