Although some versions of sed accept backslash escapes for octal, hexadecimal, and common character escapes like \n for <newline> and \t for <tab>; none of these are present in "standard" sed.

The sed command needed to change Latin capital letter A with acute to Latin capital letter A is simple:

Code:

sed 's/Á/A/' lalo.txt

but this works if, and only if, your current locale is using the same codeset that is used to encode Latin capital letter A with acute that is present in lalo.txt. Based on the od output you showed us in post #1, we can say that Latin capital letter A with acute is encoded correctly for the ISO/IEC 8859-1 codeset in lalo.txt. And based on the other posts you have made in this thread, my guess would be that your current locale is using UTF-8 as its underlying codeset. Therefore, the following printfj command should create a sed command that will do what you want:

Code:

printf "LC_ALL=C sed 's/\xc1/A/' lalo.txt > lalo2.txt" > lalo.ksh

If you run the above command and then run the command:

Code:

ksh lalo.ksh

you should end up with the file lalo2.txt with the output you want, as shown by the command:

Code:

$ od -bc lalo2.ksh
0000000   101 012                                                        
           A  \n                                                        
0000002
$

The LC_ALL=C is probably needed because the ISO/IEC 8859-1 encoding of Á found in lalo.txt is not a valid character in the codeset used by your current locale. The LC_ALL=C will cause that sed command to be run in a locale where every single-byte value is a valid character. This should avoid the errors like:

Code:

sed: 1: "s/?/A/": RE error: illegal byte sequence

that you might get without it.