<div>
<blockquote>
@ / \ [ ] &lt;&nbsp;&gt; &nbsp;* - _.
</blockquote>
Is the period character part of your to-be-removed list?<br />
Have you used regular expressions before?
</div>


> @ / \ [ ] < >  * - _.

Is the period character part of your to-be-removed list?
Have you used regular expressions before?

<div>
hello!<br />
@aikimark, the period needs to remain, as it is one of the differentiators amongst sentences, and yes, i have used regex's before..<br />
<br />
@gelonida, im going to try your script in a few minutes
</div>


hello!
@aikimark, the period needs to remain, as it is one of the differentiators amongst sentences, and yes, i have used regex's before..

@gelonida, im going to try your script in a few minutes

<div>
@gelonida,<br />
<br />
hello.<br />
the text files are all the same, simple ascii txt files.<br />
i want to remove majority of special characters, but want to keep the . , ! ?
</div>


@gelonida,

hello.
the text files are all the same, simple ascii txt files.
i want to remove majority of special characters, but want to keep the . , ! ?

<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
Hello Experts,<br />
<br />
i have hundreds of txt files that i need to work with for a specific project. &nbsp;These text files are in folder c:\textfiles\<br />
i need a python script that will remove any special characters but to leave the period, question mark, exclamation point, and comma. &nbsp;The specific characters that i need removed are @ / \ [ ] &lt;&nbsp;&gt; &nbsp;* - _. <br />
The process that this might follow is,<br />
1.open file<br />
2.read file<br />
3.remove special characters<br />
4.save file with same file name<br />
<br />
but this needs to work automatically throughout the entire specified directory.<br />
the version of python im using is 2.7.3 on a windows machine.
</div>
</div>


Hello Experts,

i have hundreds of txt files that i need to work with for a specific project.  These text files are in folder c:\textfiles\
i need a python script that will remove any special characters but to leave the period, question mark, exclamation point, and comma.  The specific characters that i need removed are @ / \ [ ] < >  * - _. 
The process that this might follow is,
1.open file
2.read file
3.remove special characters
4.save file with same file name

but this needs to work automatically throughout the entire specified directory.
the version of python im using is 2.7.3 on a windows machine.

How to remove special characters from text file using python

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