In AppleScript, what is the easiest way to remove all punctuation from a string?
Try the following:

set stringToConvert to "My Plant's Dead! (But, Who Cares? I Have 12 Plants.)"
set returnedString to do shell script "echo " &amp; quoted form of stringToConvert &amp; " | tr -dc '[:alnum:]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'"


It returns: myplantsdeadbutwhocaresihave12plants

tr commands explained:


tr -dc '[:alnum:]' deletes all non alphanumeric characters (including white space).
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' converts all upper-case characters to lower-case characters.


See the man page for tr.