if you're convinced there are special characters (though I'm always a little skeptical when people tell me it's "special characters"), then you should definitely get them out of your strings, but you need to id them. Do you have binary dump program? Something that will show you the chars? (in linux I use od and look at a hexdump).

Once you know the octal values, use  s/\0(insert octal number here)//g; to strip them from the string. It may be as simple as nonuniform whitespace or tabs. In such case, strip all extra whitespace s/\s+/ /g; so that you have single spaces. Even that might be problematic with leading and trailing spaces in various places. You might consider splitting your search space and extracting only the userpref lines from each file, and storing as keys only the app.update.auto (or whatever field they are), using a regex and split.

good luck

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