The best approach to removing unwanted stuff in your program output is not to have it in the data in the first place. Depending on how you acquire the input data, you might want to sanitize it, by only keeping the printable stuff:

s/[\x00-\x1f]/_/g; # replace all unprintables with _

[download]

... or you might want to find out why you're getting unprintable characters in your input data.

As to deleting nodes, this is not possible here. Also see (tye)Re: why a nodelet can be kept against author wish?.

In reply to Re: excluding special characters when trying to print by Corion
in thread excluding special characters when trying to print by Spooky

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