title: Remove extra characters in the string in Python
body: <p>I have couple of strings (each string is a set of words) which has special characters in them. I know using strip() function, we can remove all occurrences of only one specific character from any string. Now, I would like to remove set of special characters (include !@#%&amp;*()[]{}/?&lt;> ) etc.</p>
  
  <p>What is the best way you can get these unwanted characters removed from the strings. </p>
  
  <p>in-str  = "@John, It's a fantastic #week-end%, How <em>about</em> () you"</p>
  
  <p>out-str = "John, It's a fantastic week-end, How about you"</p>