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Remove special characters from string

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# 1  
Old 12-04-2008
Question Remove special characters from string
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:
Code:
$ myscript "My name's Santiago. What's yours?" "atu"
My nme's Snigo. Wh's yors?

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

But it doesn't work with the following special characters: #%*?\
Is there any simplier way to do that?
How can I make it work with all the characters?

Thanks in advance
Santiago
# 2  
Old 12-04-2008
Try passing the special characters with a \ in front.
On the other hand why not simply use regular expressions with sed or perl etc. ?
# 3  
Old 12-04-2008
Or simply with tr. Check the -d option in the man page.

Regards
# 4  
Old 12-04-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolfclaw
Try passing the special characters with a \ in front.
On the other hand why not simply use regular expressions with sed or perl etc. ?
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?
# 5  
Old 12-04-2008
for some reason its working with single quotes in the command line arguments. I dont know why this is though *shrugs*
# 6  
Old 12-04-2008
And what's wrong with Franklin52's solution?

This is with bash:

Code:
$ ./s "My name's Santiago. What's yours?" 'atu'
My nme's Snigo. Wh's yors?
$ ./s "My# name%'s ?Santiago.\ What/'s yours?" '#%?/\'
My name's Santiago. What's yours
$ cat s
#! /bin/bash

tr 2>&- -d "$2"<<<"$1"

# 7  
Old 12-04-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by Franklin52
Or simply with tr. Check the -d option in the man page.
Great! The only character that do not work is backslah but here my new solution:
Code:
~$ cat myscript
echo "$1" | tr -d "${2//\\/\\\\}"
~$ myscript 'weird string !"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~' ' !"#$%&'\''()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~'
            <---------------------- $1 ----------------------> <---------------- $2 ---------------->
weirdstring
~$

Thanks a lot
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