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Remove non printing chars

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# 1  
Old 06-01-2004
Remove non printing chars
How can I remove all the non printing characters from a file? I've tried using sed but I can't figure out how ! (change all but...) works with the substitute command.

I know how to do it in perl but I would prefer not to use this solution.

Thanks!
# 2  
Old 06-03-2004
You could use awk. It will allow you to examine each character in an input line and only print out the ones you want.

Also:
What do you mean by non-printing characters? Will you want to leave in tabs, carriage returns, newlines and form feeds for example?
# 3  
Old 06-03-2004
mbb, thank you for your answer.

For me 'non-printing characters' are the characters with hex codes between 20 and 7E (inclusive) plus tab, carriage return, line feed (see www.asciitable.com).
# 4  
Old 06-03-2004
Maybe try...

tr -dc '[:print:]'
# 5  
Old 06-04-2004
I'm sorry. The 'printing characters' are those ones with hex codes between 20 and 7E (inclusive) plus tab, carriage return, line feed. The others are the 'non-printing characters'.

Ygor, your solution also removes the new lines and I need them to parse the file.
# 6  
Old 06-04-2004
I have pointed you in the right direction by using the "tr" utility with the "-d" and "-c" options. If you looked at the man page and adapted the string to your precise requirements then you might have come up with...

tr -dc '[\011\012\015\040-\176]'
# 7  
Old 06-18-2004
Ygor, you're right. Thank you.
Here is how I solved the problem:

Code:
tr -dc "[:alnum:][:space:][:punct:]"
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