how to get rid of the empty string or unprintable characters?

[Hanry Zhou]

I have a string $xyz, and the valume of that is "HP-UX". I believe there are some either null strings or unprintable characters, how do I get rid of these null strings or unpritable characters?

Thanks,

[harry d brown jr]

unset $xyz

or

xyz=""

live free or die
harry

[Hanry Zhou]

harry,

You misunderstood my question.

The xyz variable includes the value of "HP-UX", and also some null or unpritable characters, I want to get rid of these characters, and just leave exactly "HP-UX".

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

# xyz="HP-UX^A "
# echo $xyz | od -bc
0000000 H P - U X 001 \n
110 120 055 125 130 001 012
0000007
# xyz=`echo $xyz|tr -cd "A-Za-z-"`
# echo $xyz | od -bc
0000000 H P - U X \n
110 120 055 125 130 012
0000006
#

live free or die
harry

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

You could do something like this

xyz=$(echo $xyz |strings|sed 's/[ ]*//g')

-Sri

[Heiner E. Lennackers]

You may try the "tr" command:

newvar=`echo $var | tr -cd "-a-zA-Z0-9"`

this deletes all characters in the strings except the ones you specify. See the manpage to understand the options.

[RAC_1]

When you know, you only want HPUX, why not use cut command

echo $var|cut -c1-4

Anil

[Muthukumar_5]

Hai,

We can remove the emtry stirngs using [:blank:] class and unprintable stirngs by [^:print:] (negatation of printable characters) To know more about this go to regexp man page on character class

xyz="HP-UX"

new_xyz=$(echo $xyz | tr -d "[:blank:][^:print:]")

There is a change in the old tr setup as

var="HP-UX"
new=`echo $var | tr -cd "\-a-zA-Z0-9"`

Use delimiter,because it will take as an option of tr.

Regards,
Muthukumar.

[Muthukumar_5]

Hai.

To remove the control char's as like \n we have to use [[:cntrl:]] regexp class. We can remove it easily as

xy="HP-UX^X"

# echo $xyz | tr -d "[[:blank:]][[^:print:]][[:cntrl:]]"| od -bc
0000000 H P - U X A
110 120 055 125 130 101
0000006

Regards,
Muthukumar.