If you are stripping out all characters from a known set then tr is the way to go for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's lightning fast. Secondly you cannot accidentally construct a pattern of more than a single character. Here is a test to demonstrate.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More tests => 1;

my $in   = q/xTest-1 [ ] 'copy'.png     /;
my $want = 'xTest-1copy.png';

my $have = filter ($in);

is $have, $want;

sub filter {
    my $str = shift or return '';
    return $str =~ tr/A-Za-z0-9.-//cdr;
}

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In reply to Re: Removing unwanted chars from filename. by hippo
in thread Removing unwanted chars from filename. by Anonymous Monk

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