Create a hex dump of the problematic file, and post a relevant part of it.
If you are on unix (Linux, BSD, Mac OS X), try the command od -tx1 -c filename.txt:
>find . -name '*.txt' -print -exec od -tx1 -c {} \; ./linux-file.txt 0000000 41 20 73 69 6d 70 6c 65 20 66 69 6c 65 20 67 6 +5 A s i m p l e f i l e g +e 0000020 6e 65 72 61 74 65 64 0a 6f 6e 20 4c 69 6e 75 7 +8 n e r a t e d \n o n L i n u +x 0000040 20 77 69 74 68 20 55 6e 69 78 0a 6c 69 6e 65 2 +0 w i t h U n i x \n l i n e 0000060 65 6e 64 69 6e 67 73 2e 0a e n d i n g s . \n 0000071 ./windows-file.txt 0000000 41 20 73 69 6d 70 6c 65 20 66 69 6c 65 20 67 6 +5 A s i m p l e f i l e g +e 0000020 6e 65 72 61 74 65 64 0d 0a 6f 6e 20 57 69 6e 6 +4 n e r a t e d \r \n o n W i n +d 0000040 6f 77 73 20 77 69 74 68 20 57 69 6e 64 6f 77 7 +3 o w s w i t h W i n d o w +s 0000060 0d 0a 6c 69 6e 65 20 65 6e 64 69 6e 67 73 2e 0 +d \r \n l i n e e n d i n g s . \ +r 0000100 0a \n 0000101 ./mac-file.txt 0000000 41 20 73 69 6d 70 6c 65 20 66 69 6c 65 20 67 6 +5 A s i m p l e f i l e g +e 0000020 6e 65 72 61 74 65 64 0d 6f 6e 20 57 69 6e 64 6 +f n e r a t e d \r o n W i n d +o 0000040 77 73 20 77 69 74 68 20 4f 6c 64 20 4d 61 63 0 +d w s w i t h O l d M a c \ +r 0000060 6c 69 6e 65 20 65 6e 64 69 6e 67 73 2e 0d l i n e e n d i n g s . \r 0000076
A plain ASCII file should not contain any bytes outside the range 0x20 to 0x7E, except for 0x0D and / or 0x0A for newlines. Any other byte value below 0x20 is very fishy, as is 0x7F. Bytes from 0x80 to 0xFF should not appear in ASCII files, they may indicate some other encoding, like UTF-8 and various legacy encodings.
If (nearly) every second byte is 0x00, it is very likely a text file encoded in UTF-16 or UCS-2; if only every fourth byte is not 0x00, the file is probably encoded in UTF-32.
Alexander
In reply to Re^5: Regular expressions across multiple lines
by afoken
in thread Regular expressions across multiple lines
by abcd
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