Removing junk characters from text files?

[William O'Higgins]

I get to deal with text files from Windoze and Mac sources on a regular
basis, and frequently they are filled with junk characters.  I would
love to be able to de-cruft these files in a systematic way.  I have no
idea what some of the characters are - they often show up blue in vim,
and they have numbers like \240 in hex.  I thought that bvi might work
to let me search and replace then by hex code, but that didn't seem to
work.  I can usually deal with the infamous "^M" with flip, but I'd love
something in Perl or vim (so I can understand it - I'm sure it's doable
in assembly or bash or smalltalk, but then I wouldn't learn anything)
that will hunt out these weird artifacts of wonky software and remove
them.  Any suggestions?

Thanks.
-- 

yours,

William

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/legacy/attachments/20050204/78dd4660/attachment.sig>