Search & Replace Revisited

codejnki has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Ok here's the deal I've got a form which outputs strings of numbers in to multiple text files. We are going to have to do number crunching on them. This is the output we get:

if you cat file1.txt you get
123
12
23

if you pull file1.txt in to vi you get
1^@2^@3
1^@2
2^@3

if i pull file1.txt in to notepad.exe you get
1 2 3
1 2
2 3

HERE'S WHAT I WANT
I would like a simple way to change this mysterious control character in to a comma so that my fil1.txt becomes
1,2,3
1,2
2,3

This is so I've got a comma delimited file (duh) and can pull it in to a spreadsheed and do all sorts of number crunching on it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Comment on Search & Replace Revisited

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Re: Search & Replace Revisited by Kanji (Parson) on Oct 06, 2000 at 05:08 UTC
Use s/// to replace any characters except those you want. `perl -pi.bak -e 's#[^\d$/]#,#g' file1.txt` Yeah, `\D` would have been simpler than `[^\d$/]`, but then you'd also get the input record seperator assuming it hadn't been set to a number.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
(jcwren) RE: Re: Search & Replace Revisited by jcwren (Prior) on Oct 06, 2000 at 05:14 UTC
The `^@` is a null, or \0. `perl -pi.bak -e 's#\0#,#g' file1.txt` [download] --Chris e-mail jcwren	[reply] [d/l] [select]