remove special characters from text using PERL

Hi,

I am stuck with a problem here.

Suppose i have a variable which is assigned some string containing special charatcers. for eg:

$a="abcdef^bbwk#kdbcd@";

I have to remove the special characters using Perl. The text is assigned to the variable implicitly.

How to do it?

#!/usr/bin/perl

$a = "abcdef^bbwk#kdbcd@";
$a =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]*//g;

print $a . "\n";

will produce

abcdefbbwkkdbcd