On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Adam Morris wrote:

> Try \x{8a0} instead.  I think that \x normally accepts only two 
> following characters, so you have to use \x{} for long hexadecimal 
> numbers.

You top posted, so I have to ignore you.

Just kidding.  I did try that and that didn't work either.  Then I did 
this...

perl -pe 's/[[:ascii:]]//g ; s/(.)/$1\n/g' file.txt | sort | uniq -c >| bad_chars.txt

...and when I looked at the resulting bad_chars.txt file in emacs again, 
the characters looked different.  Before they were appearing as purple 
rectangles, but now they appeared as a pair of characters that looked like 
this: \302\240

I could represent them exactly that way in perl and delete them.  I don't 
really get what was happening there.

Mike


> On Mar 5, 2011, at 20:22 , Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Jonah wrote:
>>
>>> Who wants to contribute to a list, when it may spiral off into some 
>>> off-topic agonizing showboating?
>>
>> I'd do it.  I like it if people stay on topic, but sometimes threads 
>> spin off into some random direction.  It doesn't kill me.
>>
>> For example, you are writing about your personal feelings about 
>> religion appearing on a technical Linux list, but I'm changing the 
>> subject because I noticed a character in a text file that emacs 
>> described as follows:
>>
>> 2208, #o4240, #x8a0
>>
>> I'm trying to figure out how to use perl to remove such characters from 
>> a text file.  It seems like it would be easy using something like 
>> s/\x8a0//, but that isn't it.  Anyone know?
>>
>> Mike