python - Removing single quotes if they aren't in the middle of a word

Question

I want to be able to remove all punctuation and single quotes ' from a string, unless the single quote ' is in the middle of a word.

At this point I have the following code:

with open('test.txt','r') as f:
    for line in f:
        line = line.lower()
        line = re.sub('[^a-z ']+', " ", line)
        print line

if there happens to be a line in test.txt like:

Here is some stuff. 'Now there are quotes.' Now there's not.

The result I want is:

here is some stuff now there are quotes now there's not

But the result I get is:

here is some stuff 'now there are quotes' now there's not

How can I remove the single quotes ' from a string if they're at the beginning or end of the word but not in the middle? Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Split the string, use strip() on each word to remove leading and trailing characters on it, then join it all back together.

>>> s = "'here is some stuff 'now there are quotes' now there's not'"
>>> print(' '.join(w.strip("'") for w in s.split()).lower())
here is some stuff now there are quotes now there's not