Removing punctuation and lowercasing a string I am very fresh to python. As part of an assignment, I've written the following code to remove punctuation from a string and convert it to lowercase.

import string

words = "Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Dave";
translation = str.maketrans("","", string.punctuation);
new = words.translate(translation);
lower = new.lower();


However, this seems crude to me and I feel like I can accomplish my task with fewer function calls/less code. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could do this?
Instead of just import string you could get the punctuation list directly:

from string import punctuation

words = "Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Dave"
translation = str.maketrans("", "", punctuation)


I'd also remove the semicolons. Python doesn't need them to know when a line of code ends since it uses newlines instead (there are exceptions, but none here) so you can remove them.