Most direct way to strip unoprintable characters out of a string?

[George Sakkis]

"Steve Bergman" <steve at rueb.com> wrote:

> When sanitizing data coming in from HTML forms, I'm doing this (lifted
> from the Python Cookbook):
>
> from string import maketrans, translate, printable
> allchars = maketrans('','')
> delchars = translate(allchars, allchars, printable)
> input_string = translate(input_string, allchars, delchars)
>
> Which is OK.  But it seems like there should be more straightforward way
> that I just haven't figured out.  Is there?

If by straightforward you mean one-liner, there is:
''.join(c for c in input_string if c not in string.printable)

If you care about performance though, string.translate is faster; as always, the best way to decide
on a performance issue is to profile the alternatives on your data and see if it's worth going for
the fastest one at the expense of readability.

George