Removing junk characters from text files?

[John Macdonald]

On Thursday 10 February 2005 20:08, William O'Higgins wrote:
[ ... ]
> 
> Henry Spencer's solution:
> 
> >        tr -cd '\n\040-\176'
> >
> >That gets rid of everything except newlines and the printable ASCII
> >characters.  (\177, aka character 127, is not printable.)
> 
> That worked great, but it took me a while to remember how to put that on
> a command line, like so:
> 
> cat filewithcrap.csv | tr -cd '\n\040-\176' > crapfree.csv

Dating from back in the days when every process used a significant portion
of the available memory, I always shudder slightly when I see cat used
to redirect input into a pipeline.  Just use:

  tr -cd '\n\040-\176' < filewithcrap.csv > crapfree.csv
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