127 – Remove punctuation functionally

127 – Remove punctuation functionally#

You already know how to remove punctuation from a string, but you can leverage functools.Placeholder (new in Python 3.14) and functools.partial to turn that into a function:

from functools import Placeholder as _P, partial
import string

remove_punctuation = partial(
    str.translate,
    _P,
    str.maketrans("", "", string.punctuation),
)

Now, you can pass a string into the function remove_punctuation, which puts it as the first argument to str.translate because of the usage of Placeholder:

print(remove_punctuation("Hello, world!"))
# Hello world

This wouldn’t have been possible without Placeholder because str.translate only accepts positional-only arguments.