Anyone been here before -

I have a folder of several hundred files mixed Claris/Apple works. I 
want to merge these files and save them as ASCII text. I could use 
applescript I suppose to get these apps to do the job but I haven't 
used apple script since about OS 7 and to be honest I prefer perl.

What's bugging me is Claris/Apple works files have some kind of 
binary info packed around the text content  which -
varies in length
varies in content and in particular doesn't use any special constants 
to delinieate where the text content begins and ends

The only method I've found which works with any consistency involves 
using tr// to remove any non acii chars, however it's not perfect as 
it leaves, obviously, binary bits which do infact match an ascii 
value so I end up with lines like.

AG AJBbnab
jhavgfavThis is the start of the file
.....
this is the endzsgFahhiobakljbaKVBHDK

Before I get into making a regex to clean this up, which at this 
point look like I'm going to have to define which groups of 
consonants can legally come together, I'm casting about for 
alternative approaches or pointers to and/either what the binary data 
is for (I'm assuming window position, font info and save path etc) or 
how the internal Claris/Apple works filters actually filter this guff 
out when they save a file as ASCII text.


as always any help is well, nay gratefully, received


Robin

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