using sed to remove special characters

[Omololu Shobayo]

Please, how can I remove special characters from an xtml file. The hex value of the special character is known.

[Steven E. Protter]

you don't need to know the hex.

special characters require a \@ in the sed statement to make a change.

sed s/steve\@aol.com/steveprotter\@aol.com/g

# not fully tested...

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

Probably easier just using tr:

tr -d "\033" myfile.xml > newfile.xml

which strips out the escape character from myfile.xml.

[Omololu Shobayo]

I dont want to strip out but to replace it with another special character.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

# man tr

# tr -d x
where x is/are the special character(s)

# tr -d '\043'
will delete #'s from the file (043 being the octal representation of the ascii value of '#')

# tr -d '\043\243'
Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

# perl -pi -e's/\234/\432/g' file

will in-place change \234 to \432 everywhere

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

I would simply use tr.

e.g.

cat oldfile | tr -d '\015\033' > newfile
would delete all CR (octal 15) and ESC (octal 33) characters from oldfile.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

To replace the special characters, you can use the same 'tr' command.

$cat file
Hmm... !This is a warning!
$tr -s '\042' '\041'< file
Hmm... "This is a warning"

-Sri

[Omololu Shobayo]

Thansk everyone. The actual command used in the script was as below.

cat filename|tr -s '\226' '\230\226' >newfile


the command tr -d "\256" filename was giving all sorts of error but I believe piping would solve the error issues.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

1. In my answer I did add a redirection

# tr -d "\256" < filename

which should take care of the errors.

2. I *think* that you do not understand tr's -s option. It is *not* about substitution, but about squeezing multiple occurrances of the same character to 1

3. You should asign points to the answers

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[Omololu Shobayo]

Fortunately in this case I have only one item to subtitute.