Re: remove/replace non-ascii characters from file
On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> I have a silly Window$ application that is supposed to export ascii
> data. In fact the file is 99% percent ascii (after dos2unix), but
> contains a line starting with "Comment: " that contains non-ascii
> garbage (represented as ^@^@^@^@^@^@ etc.)
>
> I tried
> $ grep -v Comment
> but that just returns
> Binary file darkaa2.dat matches
>
> Is there a simple way to remove this line?
Why not filter the file through "strings" first? eg:
strings infile > outfile
That will remove any non-printable characters.
Or use "tr", eg:
tr -cd '[:print:]\n' < infile > outfile
That will delete any characters that are not printable or newlines or
spaces.
You will probably need to experiment a little to ensure that these don't
remove any other characters that you still want.
Regards
Jim Holland
System Administrator
MANGO - Zimbabwe's non-profit e-mail service
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