title: Eliminating series of .replace() calls in Python
body: <p>I'm working on a project that involves parsing pages of text. I've written the following function to remove certain punctuation from a word and convert it to lowercase:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def format_word(word):
      return word.replace('.', '').replace(',', '').replace('\"', '').lower()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any way to combine all of the calls to .replace() into one? This looks rather ugly the way it is! The only way I can think of doing it is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def format_word(word):
      for punct in '.,\"':
          word.replace(punct, '')
      return word.lower()
  </code></pre>