How to remove punctuations in a dictionary

Question

I have a dictionary where key is string and values are a list of strings. I tried to remove the punctuations using strings.punctuations from import strings module.

>>> dat = {'2008':['what!','@cool','#fog','@dddong'],'2010':['hey','@cute']}
>>> 

>>> def remove_punct(data):
...     import string
...     punct = string.punctuation
...     rpunct = punct.replace('@',"") # withold @
...     for k,v in data.items():
...         for word in data[k]:
...             word = word.strip(rpunct)
...     return data
... 
>>> remove_punct(dat)
{'2008': ['what!', '@cool', '#fog', '@dddong'], '2010': ['hey', '@cute']}

Why won't I get the result with # and ! removed?

Do I have to define the dictionary again, after word.strip(rpunct)...?

Answer 1

You are not actually modifying data. You need to either directly modify data or create a new dictionary and fill this with the new data:

>>> dat = {'2008':['what!','@cool','#fog','@dddong'],'2010':['hey','@cute']}
>>> 
>>> def remove_punct(data):
...     import string
...     new_data = {} # the data we will return
...     punct = string.punctuation
...     rpunct = punct.replace('@',"") # withold @
...     for k,v in data.items():
...         new_data[k] = []
...         for word in data[k]:
...             new_data[k].append(word.strip(rpunct))
...     return new_data
... 
>>> remove_punct(dat)
{'2008': ['what', '@cool', 'fog', '@dddong'], '2010': ['hey', '@cute']}

Or in fewer lines:

>>> from string import punctuation
>>> rpunct = punctuation.replace('@',"") # withold @
>>> new_data = {k: [word.strip(rpunct) for word in dat[k]] for k in dat}