In the example line I gave before:

Canciones\251STAMPID\253\277De quien es la cancion "STAND BY ME"*4 the cause

I would simply like to delete the '\253' from the line (there is more that I will eventually want to do, but if I could complete this simple action, the rest ought to be a piece of cake. my first attempt at this was:

$_ = s/\\253//g;

This failed miserably. The problem is that the '\253' is being treated as a single character (i.e., if I try to highlight just one digit, it highlights the entire 4 digit string) I'm trying to write a c++ program to convert the codes to ASCII.