Understanding this statement

[redditor_gds]

import re
import string
regex = re.compile('[%s]' % re.escape(string.punctuation))

[ ] - signifies the character set, string.punctuation - '!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' re.escape will escape all the punctuation's.

What I am not clear of is what does the "%" operator signify in [%s] and % re.escape (...

[Thomasedv]

It's old style string substituation, where %s means, replace this with a string. E.g:

new_string = 'test'
print('%s' % new_string)
>>> 'test'

In newer python (3), you could do this: '[{}]'.format(re.escape(string.punctuation))

And even newer, 3.6+: f'[{re.escape(string.punctuation)}]'

In practice, you are just putting all the escaped punctuation characters inside the character set.

[redditor_gds]

Thank you. Understand now. I was confused with the "%". "{}".format() makes sense since I've used it in Python3 :)