Script to remove characters in text file
 

Hello all. I need to write a script that will open a text file and find a list of characters strings such as &37, &55 and remove them.

So if there was a line as follows:
This is &37 a &55 quick example

I want it to rewrite the file so that it now reads:
This is a quick example.

If it was just the two characters I needed to remove then I would just use a find/replace on Nano or similar, however there are about 60 of these special characters and a script would be much faster.

Many thanks for any help.

Regards
Tim

Vim could easily do the same, but sed would the tool of choice at the command line.

additionally sed and vim understand the same command.

Many thanks for all the replies. I will check out Sed & Vim.

Cheers
Tim

If they are truly 'special characters' like \n and \r or some HEX or OCTAL or UNICODE characters, then you might save time using 'tr' to transform and replace them.

http://www.linfo.org/tr.html
https://linux.die.net/man/1/tr