I am trying to remove the pattern using following code x = "mr<u+092d><u+093e><u+0935><u+0941><u+0915>" pattern = '[<u+0-9de>]' re.sub(pattern,'', x) Output mr This output is actually correct for the given sample string but when I am running this code to the corpus, it removing all the occurrences of 'de' as well as digits etc. I want these things are replaced only when < > is used. Continue reading...