title: Removing punctuations and spaces in a string without using regex
body: <p>I used import <code>string</code> and <code>string.punctuation</code> but I realized I still have <code>'…'</code> after conducting <code>string.split()</code>. I also get <code>''</code>, which I don't know why I would get it after doing <code>strip(</code>). As far as I understand, <code>strip()</code> removes the peripheral spaces, so if I have spaces between a string it would not matter:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; s = 'a dog    barks    meow!   @  … '
  &gt;&gt;&gt; s.strip()
  'a dog    barks    meow!   @  …'
  
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; import string
  &gt;&gt;&gt; k = []
  &gt;&gt;&gt; for item in s.split():
  ...  k.append(item.strip(string.punctuation))
  ... 
  &gt;&gt;&gt; k
  ['a', 'dog', 'barks', 'meow', '', '…']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like to get rid of <code>'', '…'</code>, the final output I'd like is <code>['a', 'dog', 'barks', 'meow']</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to refrain from using regex, but if that's the only solution I will consider it .. for now I'm more interested in solving this without resorting to regex.</p>