Remove all special characters, punctuation and spaces from string

This can be done without regex:

>>> string = "Special $#! characters   spaces 888323"
>>> ''.join(e for e in string if e.isalnum())
'Specialcharactersspaces888323'

You can use str.isalnum:

S.isalnum() -> bool

Return True if all characters in S are alphanumeric
and there is at least one character in S, False otherwise.

If you insist on using regex, other solutions will do fine. However note that if it can be done without using a regular expression, that's the best way to go about it.

Here is a regex to match a string of characters that are not a letters or numbers:

[^A-Za-z0-9]+

Here is the Python command to do a regex substitution:

re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9]+', '', mystring)

Shorter way :

import re
cleanString = re.sub('\W+','', string )

If you want spaces between words and numbers substitute '' with ' '

Python 2.*

I think just filter(str.isalnum, string) works

In [20]: filter(str.isalnum, 'string with special chars like !,#$% etcs.')
Out[20]: 'stringwithspecialcharslikeetcs'

Python 3.*

In Python3, filter( ) function would return an itertable object (instead of string unlike in above). One has to join back to get a string from itertable:

''.join(filter(str.isalnum, string)) 

or to pass list in join use (not sure but can be fast a bit)

''.join([*filter(str.isalnum, string)])

note: unpacking in [*args] valid from Python >= 3.5