Removing unwanted characters

Gorby has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Wise Monks,

I want to turn into spaces any non-letter, non-number and non-space characters from a string. The following code doesn't seem to work:

$stringtoclean=~s/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]+/ /
[download]

How should I write this so that it'll work?

Thanks in advance.

Gorby

Comment on Removing unwanted characters Download Code

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Re: Removing unwanted characters by ambrus (Abbot) on Oct 18, 2005 at 13:12 UTC
Add a `g` flag. Like `$stringtoclean=~s/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]+/ /g`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Removing unwanted characters by samizdat (Vicar) on Oct 18, 2005 at 13:21 UTC
`s/[^A-Za-z0-9]/ /g;` [download] _each_ unwanted character will be replaced by a single space. Is this what you want? Your regex would replace one _group_ of unwanted characters with a space.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Removing unwanted characters by Fletch (Bishop) on Oct 18, 2005 at 13:52 UTC
And of course TMTOWTDI: `y/A-Za-z0-9 / /c;`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Removing unwanted characters by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Oct 18, 2005 at 14:06 UTC
And by adding the s flag, any run of such characters will translate into a single space. Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply]