Question: For example I have a sentence 

```
"He is so .... cool!"

```

Then I remove all the punctuation and make it in a list.

```
["He", "is", "so", "", "cool"]

```

How do I remove or ignore the empty string?

Answer: 
You can filter it like this

```
orig = ["He", "is", "so", "", "cool"]
result = [x for x in orig if x]

```

Or you can use `filter`. In python 3 `filter` returns a generator, thus `list()` turns it into a list. This works also in python 2.7

```
result = list(filter(None, orig))

```
You can use a list comprehension:

```
cleaned = [x for x in your_list if x]

```

Although I would use regex to extract the words:

```
>>> import re
>>> sentence = 'This is some cool sentence with,    spaces'
>>> re.findall(r'(\w+)', sentence)
['This', 'is', 'some', 'cool', 'sentence', 'with', 'spaces']

```