[FIXED] TypeError: maketrans() takes exactly 2 arguments (3 given)

Issue

The following code adapted from a website for removing punctuations from words.

import string    
filename = 'some_file.txt'
file = open(filename, 'rt')
text = file.read()
file.close()
# split the text into words
words = text.split()

table = str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation)
stripped = [w.translate(table) for w in words]
print(stripped[:100])

The error is "TypeError: maketrans() takes exactly 2 arguments (3 given)". I read the Python documentation that says the options for having 1, 2 or 3 arguments of maketrans(). The docs.python.org says: "If there is a third argument, it must be a string, whose characters will be mapped to None in the result". I'm using Python 2. Any idea to clear the error?

Solution

I think you are confusing the python3.1 docs(where in the "If there is a third argument, it...... " statement is mentioned.) with Python2. As per python2 documentation - https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html, it cannot have 3 parameters.

But if you want to achieve the functionality of having a 3rd parameter (to map a set of characters to None), you can do it by adding the string to translate,

stripped = [w.translate(table, string.punctuation) for w in words]

Answered By - Sivakumar Natarajan