Removing forward slashess from a string

Hi I have a string with the date and i want to remove the slashes.

it is formated like this $date=4/8/2008
i would like to make it $date=482008
is there an easy way to do this i’m not very familiar with all the different functions of the string class so there might be a function that does exactly what i want but i don’t know about it yet.
Thanks