Replacing ^L with \n

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Replacing ^L with \n by suaveant (Parson) on Apr 05, 2001 at 22:28 UTC
`\cL` will match ^L - Ant	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Replacing ^L with \n by extremely (Priest) on Apr 05, 2001 at 23:24 UTC
Or `\f` works too. Perl has a basically completely unused shortcut for formfeed thanks to its early use in puking reports to cruddy lineprinters. =) -- $you = new YOU; honk() if $you->love(perl)	[reply]
Re: Replacing ^L with \n by deprecated (Priest) on Apr 05, 2001 at 22:34 UTC
warning, non perl solution below! Because youre using the expression "some DOS text" I will (possibly mistakenly) assume that you are using a nix. In which case, you can use perl but its sort of overkill. I would use sed(1). `[alex@creamy]$ sed 's:^L:\n:g' filename > filename.out` [download] of course, to create a ^L you actually need to do a ^V^L or your shell will assume you really mean ^L. Also, `\n` is native to the gnu sed, and may not work in BSD or ATT nix's. brother dep. -- Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Replacing ^L with \n by auzten (Initiate) on Apr 05, 2001 at 23:36 UTC
That ended up replacing ^L with the actual character n, not a carriage return. I tried this and it worked: perl -pi -e 's/^L/\n/g' file.txt Maybe I should learn something about regular expressions? Muchos Gracias -auzten	[reply]
Re: Replacing ^L with \n by yakko (Friar) on Apr 05, 2001 at 23:51 UTC
`tr/\f/\n/;` [download] ... is another way to convert it. -- Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Replacing ^L with \n by swiftone (Curate) on Apr 05, 2001 at 22:43 UTC
Ant has demonstrated how you can replace it. I just wanted to drop an FYI and mention that ^L was the traditional page feed (i.e. page break for printing) on DOS boxes (I suspect it has earlier origins, but I don't know them). Just in case you were curious what they were.	[reply]