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Stripping characters from a variable

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# 1  
Old 05-27-2010
Question Stripping characters from a variable
I'm using a shell script to get user input with this command:

read UserInput

I would then like to take the "UserInput" variable and strip out all of the following characters, regardless of where they appear in the variable or how many occurrences there are:

\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@

I'm not sure how to do that, though. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
# 2  
Old 05-27-2010
How about ...

Code:
[house@leonov] input='some\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@text' ; echo "$input" | sed 's/\W//g'
sometext

# 3  
Old 05-27-2010
Would the tr command do what you want?
Code:
>echo "stuff[]<>more" | tr -cd "[:alpha:]"
stuffmore

# 4  
Old 05-27-2010
Thanks for the replies! I would still like the user input to be able to contain numbers, spaces, and other special characters like there:

`~!
# 5  
Old 05-27-2010
Code:
UserInput=$(echo "$UserInput" | tr -d '\\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@')

Sample run:
Code:
$ UserInput='~he\/"[]:|<>l+=;,?l*@o!'
$ echo "$UserInput"
~he\/"[]:|<>l+=;,?l*@o!
$ UserInput=$(echo "$UserInput" | tr -d '\\/"[]:|<>+=;,?*@')
$ echo "$UserInput"
~hello!

Regards,
Alister
Last edited by alister; 05-27-2010 at 04:50 PM..
# 6  
Old 05-27-2010
Thanks, alister! That's exactly what I needed! Smilie
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