Replace punctuation symbols in Python

Below is an explanation of how to replace punctuation symbols with whitespace in Python.

import re, string

def remove_punctuation(text):
    return re.sub('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation), ' ', text)

Calling the previous function:

>>> remove_punctuation("El perro, de San Roque, no tiene rabo; ni nunca lo ha tenido.")

We will get this output:

'El perro  de San Roque  no tiene rabo  ni nunca lo ha tenido '

We could make the function a little bit more generic to replace punctuation symbols with any other string.

import re, string

def replace_punctuation(text, replace):
    return re.sub('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation), replace, text)

Calling the function to replace punctuation symbols by "[stop]":

>>> replace_punctuation(
    "El perro, de San Roque, no tiene rabo; ni nunca lo ha tenido.",
    '[stop]')

# output
'El perro[stop] de San Roque[stop] no tiene rabo[stop] ni nunca lo ha tenido[stop]'