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 they'd be willing to share that would remove all non-printing characters from an ASCII file?

Thanks,

Ralph Noble

[Mofi]

Following regexp search in UltraEdit style will find any character, which is greater than 0x00 (NULL) and lower than 0x20 (SPACE) and greater than 0x7E except CR, LF and TAB.

Find: [~!"#$%&'()*+,^-./0-9:;<=>?@A-Z^[\^]^^_`{|}~ ^p^t]

To delete this non printing characters use replace instead of simple search.

An addition - Finding NULL:

Do you want the NULL only inside a double quoted text or simply in the whole file?

In the whole file it is easy, search for 00 in hex mode.

If you want to find it only in a string, you first must copy a NULL to clipboard. Create it in hex mode temporary, if necessary. Then make a regexp search for "*^c*" with the UltraEdit regular expression engine and UltraEdit highlights the string with a NULL inside. The NULL should be displayed as space.