Regex examples for removing numbers and special characters inside a word

clean_word.py

from __future__ import unicode_literals, print_function
import re

'''
For a token (word):
clean_words removes anything that is not alphanumeric (numbers, special characters)
remove_numbers substitutes a number with a placeholder NUMBER
'''
def clean_words(word):
  try:
    word = re.sub(r'\W|\d', '', word, flags=re.UNICODE)
  except:
    pass
  return word

def remove_numbers(word):
  try:
    word = re.sub(r'\d', ' NUMBER ', word, flags=re.UNICODE)
  except:
    pass
  return word

word = "l8ter"
print(clean_words(word))
print(remove_numbers(word))