How do you trim part of a word off from an array?

I have a program which takes user input (which is a full sentence) and returns it as an array. if the sentence the user has input include keywords which are predefined, an SQL query is run.

my question is, if the user inputs a number, for example, £10000. how can i make sure that this amount is included in the SQL query, I know i need to make sure that the keyword includes the £ but then before i can transfer this amount into the SQL query, i need to take off the £ sign.

i'm not sure how to go about this at the moment.

thanks in advance.

you could do a charAt(0) that checks if the first character in the string is that symbol and if so run valueOf() on the subString that goes from 1 to string length.