title: Pythonic way to remove characters in string
body: <p>What is a neat way to remove different characters from a string? For example, I have the following strings that I need to convert to integers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>($12,990)
  $21,434
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I use the following code which works fine, but is there a less bulkier way to do the same?</p>
  
  <pre><code>string = string.replace(",", "")
  string = string.replace("$", "")
  string = string.replace("(", "-")
  string = string.replace(")", "")
  int(string)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Edit: I am using Python 2.7.</p>