Question

I need to remove everything that is not a letter, lowercase or uppercase, from a file and replace it with a space, e.g.:

The bear ate 3 snakes, then ate 50% of the fish from the river.

This becomes:

The bear ate   snakes  then ate     of the fish from the river 

• Sometimes the file contains unusual characters. It is saved as UTF-8.

How can I replace any non-letters with a space?

Answer 1

$ echo "The bear ate 3 snakes, then ate 50% of the fish from the river." | sed "s/[^a-zA-Z]/ /g"
The bear ate   snakes  then ate     of the fish from the river