Removing everything except words, digits and spaces using python regex

Question

Using Regex to remove everything except words, digits and spaces.

This is the function I defined:

def remove(text):
   return re.sub(r'[^\w\d\s]', '', text)

Is there anything extra or something missed out

Answer 1

\\w actually catches all the alphabets ( [A-Za-z] ), numbers ( \\d ), and underscores _

Regx101 Demo for \\w+

So, better try this code (with a different Regex)

def remove(text):
   return re.sub(r'[^A-Za-z\d\s]+', '', text)

Tell me if its not working...

Answer 2

Your approach will work. For example:

 import re

 text = ' !"(/£hello world1!!!!%"& '

 def remove(text):
   return re.sub(r'[^\w\d\s]', '', text)

 print (remove(text))

Your output will be:

 >>> hello world1

See this example here .