Bash has built-in facilities to trim characters at the beginning and end of the value of a variable:
$ myvar="AAAthis is a testAAA" $ echo ${myvar##*(A)} this is a testAAA $ echo ${myvar%%*(A)} AAAthis is a test
I work as a freelancer, so if you don’t want to do that kind of things yourself or don’t have the time, just drop me a line to hire me.