or just extract the ascii that they contain

This basic code will print an ASCII printable character, or '?' if outside the range:
use warnings;
use strict;

while(<>) {

    for my $char (split '') {
        my $ord = ord($char); 
        print $ord > 31 && $ord < 128 ? $char : '?'
    }
}

[download]
Run it from the command line like this: myscript.pl filename
Note that this only covers ASCII, if you are using ISO Latin 1 (which you might be) then change the 128 to 256.

Update: The code above is not ideal because it relies on new-lines to terminate each "record", which might not exist. Might be better with:
use warnings;
use strict;

open (my $handle, '<', $ARGV[0]) or 
    die "Unable to open $ARGV[0]: $!";

binmode $handle;
   
while(read ($handle, my $buffer,80)) {

    for my $char (split '', $buffer) {
        my $ord = ord($char); 
        print $ord > 31 && $ord < 128 ? $char : '?'
    }
    print "\n";
}

[download]
Run it in the same way as before.

In reply to Re: binary to ascii convertion by cdarke
in thread binary to ascii convertion by pytheas

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.