Help - Matching characters in a field

[Guest_imported]

I need to remove/empty fields that contain any extended characters.

Something along the lines of
if($3 "contains any characters >0x7f&quot
$3 = ""
Out of my depth here I'm afraid.

I've got 80,000 records to import into a database and need to clean this one particular field - any help much appreciated.

Adi.

 

[CaKiwi]

Someone may prove me wrong, but I don't think this is possible using awk. Awk is text based an so only recognizes ascii characters. I think you will need to use C or some other general purpose language. What other languages do you have available? CaKiwi

 

[vgersh99]

BEGIN {
# Field to check
fld2check=1;
# initialize ascii to decimal array
initascii2dec();
}

# Return: 1 - ASCII (0-255)
# 0 - > 255
function validAscii(str)
{
ret=1;

for(i=1;i<=length(str);i++)
if ( int(ascii2dec[substr(str, i, 1)]) > 255 ) {
ret=0;
break;
}

return (ret);
}

# initialize ascii to decimal map
function initascii2dec()
{
for(i=0;i<=255;i++) {
ch=sprintf(&quot;%c&quot;, i);
ascii2dec[ch] = i
}
}


{
if ( !validAscii($fld2check) )
$fld2check=&quot;&quot;;

print;
}

END {

}