Sorry, my fault, that's what I get for responding that early in the morning. I was thinking of s/// the entire time.
-----Original Message----- From: Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 7:19 AM To: Timothy Johnson Cc: 'Tim Booher'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: use perl to trim out non text characters from a file On Sep 26, Timothy Johnson said: >while(<INFILE>){ > $_ = tr/[^characterclass]//g; > print OUTFILE $_; >} > >putting a ^ at the beginning of a character class matches if the >character is NOT one of those in the brackets. That's not at all how tr/// works. tr/// ALREADY is a character class operator, and unlike a regex character class, you can't invert it with a leading ^. Instead, you must use the /c modifier. tr/// is also automatically global, and it has no /g modifier. tr/// does not automatically delete characters; you must use the /d modifier for that. Finally, tr/// works on $_ by default, and returns the number of characters adjusted, not the new string. while (<INFILE>) { tr/a-zA-Z0-9//cd; # remove all non-letters and non-numbers print OUTFILE "$_\n"; # remember that newline! } >Otherwise I think there is a predefined [:printable] or something along >those lines if you just want to get rid of non-printable characters. Yes, but those are only supported in regex character classes. s/[[:^print:]]+//g; or s/[^[:print:]]+//g; -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/ RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.cpan.org/ ** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 ** <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course. [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
