From the OP, it's not entirely clear (at least, to me) just what the OPer wants, but if all control characters are to be deleted, the substitution  s/[[:cntrl:]]+//g; might better serve: the POSIX character class syntax responds to one or both (I forget which) of Unicode and locale variations.

And, of course, the other point to make to the OPer is that the character set  [\cA-\cZ] does not represent all control characters even in the ASCII character set.