Removing Special Characters

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Removing Special Characters by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 01, 2011 at 08:03 UTC
Depending on your definition of "special", something like this might work for you: `$str =~ tr/a-zA-Z//dc` [download] Perl 6 - second systems done right	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Removing Special Characters by CountZero (Bishop) on Nov 01, 2011 at 08:40 UTC
For a banker "`%`" might not be special. And we are not even touching the subject of Unicode. CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Removing Special Characters by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Nov 01, 2011 at 08:49 UTC
Step 1: Define which characters you consider to be "special".	[reply]
Re^2: Removing Special Characters by herveus (Prior) on Nov 01, 2011 at 12:47 UTC
Howdy! Step 1 (alternate): Define the set of characters that are not "special". It may be simpler to define the characters you want to keep rather than the ones to exclude. See also the tr///dc solution above. yours, Michael	[reply]
Re: Removing Special Characters by MVS (Monk) on Nov 01, 2011 at 07:50 UTC
One possibility would be to use a regular expression to remove the characters you don't want: `$str =~ s/[#\-%&\$*+()]//g;` If you want to remove everything except alphanumeric characters and underscores, you can simplify it like this: `$str =~ s/\W//g;`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Removing Special Characters by Anonymous Monk on Nov 01, 2011 at 19:24 UTC
Like Removing some part of string, this post does not contain a Short, Self Contained, Correct Example So read perlintro and How do I post a question effectively? and adjust your post accordingly	[reply]