Solution to Python Challenge 2

Here is my very simple solution for this python challenge, using  nothing but string functions.
As one comment mentioned, it could be also done using regular expressions, which is again a separate topic and we will see usage of regular expression module(re)  in python with help of some puzzles in coming posts.

Just copy the long input string in place of long input text here as a triple quoted string and assign it to messy_str as shown in second line of code below.
You can download the python file here and run it, if python is installed on your system.

 import string  
 messy_str = """long input text here"""  
 punc=string.punctuation  
 spaces=string.whitespace  
 clean_str=messy_str.translate(None,punc)  
 clean=clean_str.translate(None,spaces)  
 print clean