Shell Programming and Scripting

s/[^!-~\s]//g;

#!/usr/bin/perl -X


$str = "Please give Bob the account of �root� so he can be more responsible.";

#########################################################################################
# In the below, !-~ is a range which matches all characters between ! and ~. The range  #
# is set between ! and ~ because these are the first and last characters in the ASCII   # 
# table (Alt+033 for ! and Alt+126 for ~ in Windows). As this range does not include    # 
# whitespace, \s is separately included. \t simply represents a tab character. \s is    # 
# similar to \t but the metacharacter \s is a shorthand for a whole character class that# 
# matches any whitespace character. This includes space, tab, newline and carriage      # 
# return. For strings assigned a value it may take this form: $str =~ s/[^!-~\s]//g;    #
#########################################################################################

$str =~ s/[^!-~\s]//g;


print "$str\n";