[Linux-disciples] Deleting all non-ASCII characters

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:37:40AM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> use strict;
> use warnings;
> while(<>) {
>     s#[^[:ascii:]]##g;
>     print;
> }

I believe that can actually be reduced
to this one-liner:

perl -n -e 's#[^[:ascii:]]##g' /path/to/file

That will dump its output to stdout. If
you want to modify the file in place,
just add a '-i' option before the '-n'.
'-i' here does the same thing as
'sed -i' does.

(In general, if you've not spotted this
already, UNIX command-line tools share a
lot of command-line arguments. E.g., -v
tends to mean either 'give verbose
output' or "print the program's version
number and exit"; -q means "spit out
minimal output": it's the opposite of
the verbose -v option.)

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
Cell: +(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key