Dear monks, this is probably a rather trivial question, but it is driving me nuts, and I can not manage to get it to work.

I have a latitude in degrees minutes seconds, like this:
55°48'10.000
I need to convert this to decimal degrees and to do that I need the 3 values separated by respectively ° and ' put into 3 separate variables.
Could anyone enlighten me on how to accomplish that? I first thought I could just substitute the ° sign with ' and then split on ' - but I am not able to do anything with °.

rgds,
Ole C.

Update
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I ended up using davorgs solution since that was exactly what I wanted to do, but I also learned a new one with the \xB0 in the split from thundergnat.

In reply to How to substitute a degree sign by olecs

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