Removing Punctuation Marks From a String

A function to remove the punctuation marks from a string.

Function removePunctuation(str)
     'Remove extraneous spaces
     Dim regEx, Match, Matches
     Set regEx = New RegExp
     regEx.Global = true
     regEx.IgnoreCase = True
     regEx.Pattern = "\s{2,}"
     str = Trim(regEx.Replace(str, " "))
     'Remove the space between the end of a word and a punctuation mark
     regEx.Pattern = "(\!|\.|\?|\;|\,|\:,|\&,|\_,|\{,|\},|\[,|\],|\(,|\),|\(,|\),|\~,|\#)"
     removePunctuation = regEx.Replace(str, "")
End Function

The function should be called as:

strValue = removePunctuation(strString)