My pre-processing suggestion would be to use tr:

tr -d "\032" < infile > outfile

...or...

tr "\032" " " < infile > outfile

If you use Gawk, you have to set its BINMODE.

Using ActivePerl for Windows, I've never had to use binmode to handle nasty ASCII control characters like NUL (0x00) and SUB (0x1A). It seems to read and write them in text mode just fine.

D:\>perl -e "print qq{\x00\x1A\nfoo\nbar\x1A\x00\n}"
 
foo
bar

D:\>perl -e "print qq{\x00\x1A\nfoo\nbar\x1A\x00\n}" |
perl -ne "print if m/foo/"
foo

D:\>
[download]

Jim