Identifying a special character

[pjb]

We receive files through email, and sometimes they show up with an extra control M (^M) character at the end of each line. Is there a way to identify this value in an if statement? I can use the alpha-numeric check I picked up on this forum yesterday, but is there a way of coding for the exact value of the '^M'?

 

[Einstein47]

You can try coding it as CTRL-V CTRL-M (the ^V is an escape for the next character)?

Or if you have already tried that, I believe that ^M is ASCII(13) so there should be a way to put that in an if statement.

Good luck - I'll watch this thread for a smarter response. I'm curious too.
Einstein47
(Love is like PI - natural, irrational, endless, and very important.)

 

[bigoldbulldog]

Get rid of those ^M with

tr -d &quot;\015&quot; < input

Cheers,
ND

 

[tdatgod]

Hi,
It sounds like you have a DOS2UNIX issue here. check to see if you UNI has a dos2unix command which will strip the ^M from the file.

another alternative is just run it through a SED script and do it yourself.

sed -e 's/<ctrl-v><Ctrl-m>//' file > file.new

The <ctrl-v> is the escape character which says the next character I type should not be a SPECIAL character.

the <ctrl-M> would normally be a return character but in this case since it is proceed by the <ctrl-v> it will amount to a ^M.



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[olded]

Hi:

Looks like you guys have it nailed. I don't care for tdatgod's solution because of the special characters. Good luck cutting and pasting that.

Here's my take in order or importance plus I'm taking possible control-z's into account:

1) The following replacement sed command works by deleting the last character of each line:

sed 's/.$//' $i.tmp > $i

Be careful! The above sed command clobbers the last character in the line, whether it's a control character or not.

2) A better solution is replacing the last character if the octal value is 15 or 32, Control-m and Control-z respectively:

sed 's/'&quot;$(printf '\015')&quot;'$//
s/'&quot;$(printf '\032')&quot;'$//' $i.tmp > $i


3) Perhaps the best solution is executing the tr command to delete all octal 15 and 32 characters. Replace the sed command with the following:

tr -d '\015\032' < $i.tmp > $i

The above command deletes all ^M and ^Z -- not just the ones at the end of the line.

Ed
Schaefer

 

[MikeLacey]

Some versions of unix come with the dos2unix and unix2dos utilities. Mike
&quot;Experience is the comb that Nature gives us after we are bald.&quot;

Is that a haiku?
I never could get the hang
of writing those things.