Variable Manimpulation - special characters

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello-

I have a variables that contains a string like this usr/pass@SCHEMA

I want to extract the usr/pass part and ignore the SCHEMA part, I tried to use this ${dbconn%%@} and apparently it will not work because @ is a special character. I tried \@ and still no go.

Any idea how to solve this problem will be much appreciated.

PS. Using ksh

Thanks,
Nomaad

2 
dbconn="user/pass@SCHEMA"
echo ${dbconn%@*}
user/pass