Problem reading a text file

[Jonathan Caplette]

Hi guys,

I got this error on some text files that I'm trying to read with dtpad:

Embedded Nulls stripped from file.

I get this error with dtpad, but when I use shell commands like "cat" or "more" I can read it... I'm practicaly sure of that error is that the application that created the file, have not ended is text file correctly... But I just want to know how can I be sur of that, if it's possible to know!!

thanks
jonathan

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Bear in mind that on most output devices like terminals, outputting an ASCII NUL does nothing. The data is there; it's just not displayed. If you do an 'od -t co myfile | pg' you can actually see both the characters and the octal codes.

[Justo Exposito]

Hi,

You can do a cat of the file over another file, this put for you the EndOfFile character, then try to open:
cat file > filenew
dtpad filenew

Other option is use od -c but if you want to view the last line you can use tail like that:

tail -1 file | od -c

Regards,

Justo.

[Mark Greene_1]

I can reproduce the same error by using dtpad to edit /usr/dt/lib/nls/msg/C.utf8/dtact.cat
(this also happens to be the file that contains the error message).

My guess is that any file that contains an embedded null (ascii zero, or cntrl-@) will generate this message.

HTH
mark

[nancy rippey]

You can use 'ed' to check the file.
ed filename
then enter ,l
the ,l will give you end of line, tab and other unprintable characters.

nancy

[Jonathan Caplette]

Actually I can read the files, but with dtpad I get the error message: "Embedded Null..." . What I wanna know is how can I, in CDE, read those file without having an error????

I tried to "cat file > newfile" then read the newfile with dtpad, and it haven't worked...

So any ideas??

[Kong Kian Chay · Accepted solution]

Jonathan

* How about using "vi" ?
That is, #vi file1.txt

* To remove all control and non-printable chars so that you can use "dtpad" without error, you can consider :
#strings file1.txt > file2.txt
#dtpad file2.txt

NOTE: Even empty lines would be removed.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

Apart from strings, you can also try col -b to remove special characters:

# cat file1.txt | col -b > file2.txt
# dtpad file2.txt

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim kok Leong

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

1- tr -d "\000" <88 > 899

2- sed -n -e '1,$p' /tmp/88 >/tmp/889