[TriLUG] Elim. unwanted characters

[William Sutton]

Can I suggest using a Perl script?

-----
use File::Slurp;
my $data = read_file("your file here");
$data =~ s/\x00/\x20/g;
# etc
write_file("your file here", $data);
-----

-- 
William Sutton

On Tue, 14 Mar 2006, Mark Freeze wrote:

> I'd like to solicit ideas for the best way to handle the following problem:
> 
> I receive 10 - 20 text files per day from various sources.  Several of
> the files that I receive are from mainframe shops. (Who can't change
> their processes for anything.) When I receive the files, certain
> sections are loaded with null characters instead of spaces.  Since I
> currently transfer these files to my PC for manual processing, I have
> been opening the files in UltraEdit, viewing the hex, and replacing
> (00) with (20).
> 
> Does anyone know of a utility that I could use to automate this
> process?  Maybe use cron to look for files in a certain directory and
> then run a program to do a 'search and  replace' for these characters?
> 
> If I were going to write my own utility in C++, what would be the
> quickest way to read in chunks of data and then do the search and
> replace?  Character by character is slow as some of these files are 80
> - 100 MB.
> 
> I'm just getting started on this process so any suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark.
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