Remove control characters


 
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# 1  
Old 09-29-2002
Remove control characters

Hi,
When I do a man and save it into a file, I end up getting a lot of control characters. How can I remove them??
I tried this:
/1,$ s/^H//g
But I get an error saying "no previous regular expression".
Can someone help me with this.

Thanks,
Aravind
# 2  
Old 09-30-2002
Try using dos2ux:

dos2ux [file] > [newfile]
# 3  
Old 09-30-2002
Please use control-v to print ^ before H..You might have printed
shift 6 .That may correspond to mapped characters in vi mode

:1,$ s/control-v,H//g

GOOD LUCK
# 4  
Old 09-30-2002
The vi command that you want is:
:1,$s/.^H//g

And since % is the same as 1,$, I like:
:%s/.^H//g

As ganti (almost) points out the ^H a control-v and a control-h.

And you need that dot. man is using stuff like "_^Hx" to output an underscore, then a backspace and finally an "x". On some devices this will result in an underlined x. If that's not possible, the x will overwrite the underscore. That's why you need to delete the character comes before the ^H.
# 5  
Old 09-30-2002
Re: Remove control characters

Aravind,

I presume, you want to save your man pages for future reference or for printing purpose.What I would suggest is to try the following command:
# man ls | col -b > filename

where,
ls - is the command whose man pages are required.
filename - is the name of the file to be saved.

I'm sure this will solve your problem.

Minaz



Quote:
Originally posted by aravind_mg
Hi,
When I do a man and save it into a file, I end up getting a lot of control characters. How can I remove them??
I tried this:
/1,$ s/^H//g
But I get an error saying "no previous regular expression".
Can someone help me with this.

Thanks,
Aravind
minazk
# 6  
Old 10-02-2002
Hi guys..thanks a lot..that was imensely helpful
 
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