str.translate

translate(table[, deletechars])

Return a copy of the string where all characters occurring in the optional argument deletechars are removed, and the remaining characters have been mapped through the given translation table, which must be a string of length 256.

For Unicode objects, the str.translate method does not accept the optional deletechars argument. Instead, it returns a copy of the s where all characters have been mapped through the given translation table which must be a mapping of Unicode ordinals to Unicode ordinals, Unicode strings or None. Unmapped characters are left untouched. Characters mapped to None are deleted. Note, a more flexible approach is to create a custom character mapping codec using the codecs module (see encodings.cp1251 for an example).