Re: Strange character beginning text files

You should try using the ord($ch) function to find out what the character is. It looks like it might be ASCII character number 1, but it's hard to tell on a webpage. If it is an unprintable ASCII character, you could use the tr operator to delete it:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "\001hello\002world\003lookit\004these\005weird\006charac
+ters";
my $string2 = $string;
# replace ASCII chars from 0 to 8 with spaces
$string =~ tr[\000-\010][         ];

# or delete weird chars:
$string2 =~ tr[\000-\010][]d;
print "string is $string\n";
print "string2 is $string2\n";

__END__
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Re^2: Strange character beginning text files by tachyon (Chancellor) on Jul 20, 2004 at 05:08 UTC
To limit data to the ASCII printable set you can just do `tr/\011\012\015\040-\176//cd` You may want to lose or change one of the CR LF chars as well. Opps, forgot tab, thanks beable cheers tachyon	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Strange character beginning text files by beable (Friar) on Jul 20, 2004 at 07:55 UTC
Tut tut, sirrah. \011 is printable. From "man ascii": `Oct Dec Hex Char 011 9 09 HT '\t'` [download] </nitpick>	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Strange character beginning text files by tachyon (Chancellor) on Jul 21, 2004 at 00:58 UTC
Ooops, forgot that! That's what happens if you code off the top of your head with no unit tests :-) cheers tachyon	[reply]