BANG! BING! BOOM! What a great reply. You see this? This is why Perlmonks is not dead, contrary to rumors.

choroba wrote:

but the carriage returns remained in the data, causing the cursor to return left and overwrite the text again and again

You know, at some point I got suspicious about the data but I couldn't visualize it doing that, so I dismissed that train of thought. What I eventually came up with (above) was partly dumb luck :-).

I totally get it now, thanks. Consider me educated by your demonstration of xxd, which I'd forgotten about.

What I've decided to use for portability is:
</dev/clipboard perl -0777 -e 'my ($l)=<>; $l=~s{\cM?\cJ}[ ]g; print $l;'

or, in your more terse and idiomatic perl:
perl -pe 's/\cM?\cJ\z/ /'

That should DTRT on either *nix or MS Windows, right?

    — Soren

Dec 29, 2025 at 21:11 UTC