import re


def pad_punctuation_w_space(text: str) -> str:
    """Pad punctuation marks with space for separate tokenization."""
    result = re.sub(r'([:;"*.,!?()/\=-])', r" \1 ", text)
    result = re.sub(r"[^a-zA-Z]", " ", result)
    result = re.sub(r"\s{2,}", " ", result)
    # code for removing single characters
    result = re.sub(r"\b[a-zA-Z]\b", "", result)
    return result