import re


def remove_punctuation(string, hyphens_are_separators=True, keep_commas=False):
    """removes punctuation from a string (simple regex replacing everything but w and
    s with nothing) and returns the string

    Keyword arguments:
    string -- the string to remove punctuation from
    hyphens_are_separators -- (optional) replace hyphens with a space first (creates a
    space in hyphenated words instead of concatenating them) (default True)
    keep_commas - (optional) don't delete commas if true (default False)
    """
    if hyphens_are_separators:
        string = re.sub(r"\-", " ", string)

    if not keep_commas:
        return re.sub(r"[^\w\s]", "", string)
    else:
        return re.sub(r"[^\w\s,]", "", string)