help replacing characters in a string

[Scooby]

Hi, could anyone tell me what i need to do to remove non alphabetical characters from a string?

im writing a script to check the chat players use against a dictionary,

i would like to be able to remove the non alphabetical characters so i can compare them with my stored word strings.

eg: if i have the words: 'how are you?'

i dont want to have to add a question mark to every stored word, so i want to remove these characters before i do the check.

basically i need to change the string "you?" into "you" and so on for non alphabetical characters.

maybe this could be done using string.gsub?

i thought i would ask here because ive never used gsub before other than removing colour codes and im sure someone could help me quicker than me trying to work it out

[Dealman]

I'd use gsub, you can find the patterns/regular expressions here.

Just have gsub remove the unwanted characters the exact same way you do with colour codes

[Scooby]

ok i'll try it. thanks.

[Et-win]

Also here: http://www.lua.org/pil/20.2.html

[AfuSensi]

str = str:gsub('%W','') 

[Scooby]

thanks guys, I managed to get it working using %A