Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm currently working on a project that requires parsing xml file. One of the field in the xml is shown below (don't remember exactly):
<variable="ITEM">12345678</variable>
I coded my script keeping in mind that the value denoted in bold will always be a number. After getting just the number I have to fire a PL/SQL procedure from the script itself and get the data, and update the existing xml file with some new fields that i received by firing the procedure.
But now the requirements have changed and now the users wants a check for special characters on the item shown as bold.
eg: We refer the text in bold as Item Number. So if the following Item Number is found 1234%1234, in this case my script should remove only the % sign and put together the rest of the numbers and form one number.
Now the problem is that there are 36 such special characters on the keyboard.
I tried using ITEMNUMBER=echo $ITEMNUMBER|sed 's/%//g'
But this would work for only one scenario. If i follow this case, I have to write 36 such statements and that would inturn reduce the performance of the script.
PS: Keep in mind the following special charaters in unix 1. & - &amp;
2. < - &lt;
3. > - &gt;
4. " - &quot;
5. ' - '

Hoping for some help

Thanks in advance.

MK

mradul_kaushik,

Use something like this.

Code:

sed -e 's/[[:alpha:]]\|[[:punct:]]//g'

This will remove any alpha and punctuation char's.

Hope it helps,

MPH