in reply to Sniffing binary data, heuristics?

I'd try /[^:[print]:]/ ? 'non-printable' : 'printable' and maybe not even go farther if the performance is ok.

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Re: Re: Sniffing binary data, heuristics?
by McMahon (Chaplain) on May 25, 2004 at 19:30 UTC
    This interests me as well. Could you elaborate on what  /[^:[print]:]/ does?
[reply]
[d/l]
      That's a typo :). What diotalevi meant to write was /[^[:print:]]/ and it means (as per `perldoc perlre'):
      C:\>perl -MYAPE::Regex::Explain -le"print YAPE::Regex::Explain->new(qr
+/[^[:print:]]/)->explain"
The regular expression:

(?-imsx:[^[:print:]])

matches as follows:

NODE                     EXPLANATION
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(?-imsx:                 group, but do not capture (case-sensitive)
                         (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not
                         matching \n) (matching whitespace and #
                         normally):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  [^[:print:]]             any character except: alphanumeric,
                           punctuation, and whitespace characters
----------------------------------------------------------------------
)                        end of grouping
----------------------------------------------------------------------

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      MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
      I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
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