If X Y and Z can legitimately be in the file you are going to have to do more work. Keep track of values that you have "fixed" substitutions in, and what the original character was. You will then have a list of 'known suspect values' as well as a way to get the original value.

The best approach (short of retrieval from a backup) would be to do as much parsing and sanity checking on the data as you process the file. Trivial/Obvious fixes can be automated, but anything questionable needs to be flagged and ask for human intervention.

Good luck. I think you'll need it :/.


TGI says moo

In reply to Re^2: scalable chomping by TGI
in thread scalable chomping by xorl

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.