In a bash script, how do I sanitize user input?

Question

I\'m looking for the best way to take a simple input:

echo -n \"Enter a string here: \"
read -e STRING

and clean it up by removing non-alph

Answer 1

After a bit of looking around it seems tr is indeed the simplest way:

export CLEANSTRING="`echo -n "${STRING}" | tr -cd '[:alnum:] [:space:]' | tr '[:space:]' '-'  | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`"

Occam's razor, I suppose.