Often, while working with strings in Python, we have different kinds of data, it may have excess spaces, punctuations, and special characters which may affect your process and results. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to remove spaces and punctuation from a string in Python.

Step 1: Understanding the Python String

In Python, strings are considered as an array of bytes representing Unicode characters. Python does not have a character type; these are treated as strings of length one, thus also considered a substring. To access substrings, Python uses square brackets to slice along with the index or indices to obtain a substring.

Step 2: Using Python’s Built-In String Methods

We can use Python’s built-in string methods to remove the whitespace and punctuation from a string. In Python, a string method is an inbuilt function that applies some functionality for the string and returns the string.

To remove the spaces, Python provides a strip() method, which returns a new string after removing any leading or trailing whitespaces.

For removing punctuation, Python provides a string method called translate() which makes replacements in the string. We’ll need to use it in conjunction with maketrans(), which returns a translation table usable for translate().

Step 3: Importing the string Module

The string module contains various string constants which contain the ASCII characters of all cases. string.punctuation is a pre-initialized string used as a string constant. In Python, string.punctuation will give all sets of punctuation.

Output:

Hello World How are you today

Conclusion

In Python, there are multiple simple ways to remove spaces and punctuations from a given string. You can use methods like strip(), translate(), and maketrans() provided in Python. Remember, any modification to a string does not change the original string in Python, but it creates a new formatted string because strings are immutable in Python.