Strings & text
Format, split, join, parse, and clean text — everyday Python string patterns.
How to Filter Text to Only Letters, Numbers, and Spaces in Python
A beginner-friendly function that filters a string to keep only alphabetic characters, digits, and spaces, removing punctuation and symbols.
def filter_text(text, keep_alpha=True, keep_digits=True, keep_spaces=True):
allowed = set()
if keep_alpha:
allowed.update("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")
if keep_digits:
allowed.update("0123456789")
if keep_spaces:
allowed.add(" ")
return "".join(ch f…How to Parse and Clean Text in Python
This code defines three helper functions to parse text into lowercase words, count unique word frequencies, and clean text by removing punctuation and extra whitespace.
def extract_words(text: str) -> list[str]:
"""Return a list of lowercase words from the given text."""
return [word.lower() for word in text.split() if word.isalpha()]
def count_unique_words(text: str) -> dict[str, int]:
"""Return a dictionary with unique words and their frequencies."""
words = extra…How to build a text helper in Python for beginners
This code provides easy-to-use functions for cleaning text, removing punctuation, counting word frequencies, and summarizing strings — perfect for beginners.
def clean_text(text: str) -> str:
"""Clean and normalize a text string."""
text = text.strip()
text = text.replace(" ", " ")
text = text.capitalize()
text = text.replace(".", ".")
return text
def remove_punctuation(text: str) -> str:
"""Remove common punctuation marks from a string."""
…How to remove punctuation from a string in Python
Remove all punctuation characters from a string using the str.translate method and string.punctuation from the standard library.
import string
def remove_punctuation(text: str) -> str:
return text.translate(str.maketrans("", "", string.punctuation))
if __name__ == "__main__":
sample = "Hello, world! It's a test... (with punctuation) - done?"
cleaned = remove_punctuation(sample)
print(f"Original: {sample}")
print(f"Cleaned:…Python String Helper Functions for Beginners
A set of beginner-friendly Python functions that count words, reverse text, convert to title case, strip punctuation, and compute character frequency from a string.
def count_words(text):
"""Count the number of words in a string."""
return len(text.split())
def reverse_text(text):
"""Reverse the entire string."""
return text[::-1]
def title_case(text):
"""Capitalize the first letter of each word."""
return text.title()
def remove_punctuation(text):
…Reverse Words in a Sentence While Keeping Punctuation in Python
Reverses the order of words in a sentence while leaving punctuation and spaces in their original positions using Python's re module.
def reverse_words_preserving_punctuation(sentence: str) -> str:
import re
# Split into words and punctuation tokens
tokens = re.findall(r'\w+|[^\w\s]|\s+', sentence)
words = [t for t in tokens if re.fullmatch(r'\w+', t)]
words.reverse()
result_parts = []
word_index = 0
for token in toke…Browse by section
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Strings & text — Python code examples
What you will find here
This page collects strings & text snippets — short, copy-ready Python you can paste into our free online IDE and run without installing anything. Each sample includes a plain-English explanation and the full source code.
Samples vs tutorials and challenges
Samples are quick reference — one concept per page. For step-by-step teaching, use our Python tutorials. To test yourself, try quizzes or coding challenges. Clean up style with the Python formatter.