Hi there,
I'd like to write a script that removes any set of character from any string. The first argument would be the string, the second argument would be the characters to remove. For example:

$ myscript "My name's Santiago. What's yours?" "atu"
My nme's Snigo. Wh's yors?

$ cat myscript
ans=$1
for (( i=0; i<${#2}; i++ )); do
    ans=${ans//${2:$i:1}/}
done
echo "$ans"

Try passing the special characters with a \ in front.
On the other hand why not simply use regular expressions with sed or perl etc. ?

Or simply with tr. Check the -d option in the man page.

Regards

Great! The only character that do not work is backslah but here my new solution:

~$ cat myscript
echo "$1" | tr -d "${2//\\/\\\\}"
~$ myscript 'weird string !"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' ' !"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~'
            <---------------------- $1 ----------------------> <---------------- $2 ---------------->
weirdstring
~$

echo "My name's Santiago. What's yours?" | tr -d "atu"

That's exactly what I was asking! I'm sure there's a simpler way of doing that... But how?
I cannot pass the special characters with a backslash because my script reads the second argument character by character. So if $2 is "\#", the script will first try to replace \ (and it fails) then try to replace # (and it fails too).
Any other idea?

for some reason its working with single quotes in the command line arguments. I dont know why this is though *shrugs*