Webmaster forum - Remove any non-word

Author

Remove any non-word

Karl Groves

2006-11-19, 7:57 pm

Before I write my own, I'm wondering if anyone has something already
written that removes everything not a word from a string. By "not a word",
I mean HTML, special characters, and punctuation. Digits allowed.

TIA

--
Karl Groves
www.karlcore.com

Chris F.A. Johnson

2006-11-19, 7:57 pm

On 2006-11-12, Karl Groves wrote:
> Before I write my own, I'm wondering if anyone has something already
> written that removes everything not a word from a string. By "not a word",
> I mean HTML, special characters, and punctuation. Digits allowed.

Presuming a *nix OS, with bash or ksh93, to remove all characters
that are not letters or numbers:

newstring=${string//[!a-zA-Z0-9]/}

If you want to remove all tags, as well, use sed:

printf "%s\n" "$str" | sed -e 's/<[^<]*>//g' -e 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9]*//g'

--
Chris F.A. Johnson <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
===================================================================
Author:
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)