Removing non-printing characters ...

[Ralph Noble]

Folks ... I have a pipe-delimited ASCII text file with a lot of
different non-printing characters. Rather than try and figure out all
the non-printing characters that exist in this 17+ million record
database, I was hoping someone might have already written a script or
know of a module they'd be willing to share that would remove all
non-printing characters from an ASCII file?

Thanks,

Ralph Noble
[email]ralph_noble@hotmail.com[/email]

[Jürgen Exner]

Ralph Noble wrote:

> Folks ... I have a pipe-delimited ASCII text file with a lot of
> different non-printing characters. Rather than try and figure out all
> the non-printing characters that exist in this 17+ million record
> database, I was hoping someone might have already written a script or
> know of a module they'd be willing to share that would remove all
> non-printing characters from an ASCII file?

Oh my, that's difficult. you need one whole command:

s/[:^print:]//g;

Further details see "perldoc perlre", section " The POSIX character class
syntax".
Reading the file and writing back the modified text is left as an exercise.

jue

[Brian McCauley]

Ralph Noble wrote:

> Folks ... I have a pipe-delimited ASCII text file with a lot of
> different non-printing characters. Rather than try and figure out all
> the non-printing characters that exist in this 17+ million record
> database, I was hoping someone might have already written a script or
> know of a module they'd be willing to share that would remove all
> non-printing characters from an ASCII file?

perl -pe 's/[[:cntrl:]]+//g'

(Note this removes all nonprinting characters including the linebreaks
too - is that really what you wanted?)

perl -lpe 's/[[:cntrl:]]+//g'

[Brian McCauley]

Jürgen Exner wrote:

> s/[:^print:]//g;

Surely you mean

s/[^[:print:]]+//g;

> Further details see "perldoc perlre", section " The POSIX character class
> syntax".

Right back at you J! :-)

[Jürgen Exner]

Brian McCauley wrote:

> Jürgen Exner wrote:
>

>> s/[:^print:]//g;

>
> Surely you mean
>
> s/[^[:print:]]+//g;
>

>> Further details see "perldoc perlre", section " The POSIX character
>> class syntax".

>
> Right back at you J! :-)

Hmmmm, indeed ;-((

jue

[Mary Pastore]

It shouldn't right? I tried using this and piping to output file, but for some reason, it returns one long line instead of my original format with many lines.