Remove Special Chars - Python Code Snippet

The Python class cleans and removes special chars. Use it to clean the properties and values. 

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import re

import logging
LOG = logging.getLogger(__name__)

class Cleaner:
    _clean_underscore = re.compile('(/|:| |\.|\+|-|!|\^|&|\[|\]|\{|\}|<|>|~|\||"|\?|=|[^\x00-\x7F])')
    _clean_remove = re.compile(r"[\'\(\)]")
    _compacter = re.compile('_+')
   
    @classmethod
    def clean(cls, s):
        try:
            if type(s) == unicode:
                s = s.encode('ascii','ignore')
            ret = str(s)
            ret = cls._clean_remove.sub('', ret)
            ret = cls._clean_underscore.sub('_', ret)
            ret = cls._compacter.sub('_', ret)
            ret = ret.strip('_')
            if ret == '':
                return '_empty_'
            return ret
        except Exception as e:
            LOG.error("problem cleaning `{}`".format(s), exc_info = 1)
            raise e