Search and Replace Garbage

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

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Search and Replace Garbage by kcott (Archbishop) on May 28, 2012 at 23:52 UTC
"This isn't working." is a totally inadequate problem description. Both `"` and, the less cryptic, `"` are HTML character entity references for a double quote (`"`). Your regex works for me: `$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'my $x = qq{X\xE2\x80\x9CX}; $x =~ s/[\x +E2][\x80][\x9C]/"/g; say $x' X"X $ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'my $x = qq{X\xE2\x80\x9CX}; $x =~ s/[\x +E2][\x80][\x9C]/"/g; say $x' X"X` [download] You can also substitute a literal double quote: `$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E 'my $x = qq{X\xE2\x80\x9CX}; $x =~ s/[\x +E2][\x80][\x9C]/"/g; say $x' X"X` [download] Please read: How do I post a question effectively? -- Ken	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Search and Replace Garbage by Anonymous Monk on May 28, 2012 at 20:37 UTC
U+E280 is character = 57984:  `- Unicode = U+E280; Decimal = 57984; HTML = .` That you're seeing unprintable garbage rendered as hex is a feature of your browser, when you don't have a font which can display said unicode character, you see the hex value Install some asian unicode fonts, so you can see something other than hex	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Search and Replace Garbage by Anonymous Monk on May 29, 2012 at 07:05 UTC
I think he means the character with the UTF-8 encoding of "E2 80 9C", U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK. However, it is still very unclear on how these "garbage" characters are stored in his file -- a hex dump would be great.	[reply]
Re^3: Search and Replace Garbage by Anonymous Monk on May 29, 2012 at 07:11 UTC
That could very well be but it could also be something else entirely. Insisting the file is corrupted and these characters are garbage , while forgetting the Basic debugging checklist ( How do I post a question effectively? ) leads me to believe these files probably aren't corrupted :)	[reply]
Re: Search and Replace Garbage by GrammyPuter (Initiate) on May 28, 2012 at 21:13 UTC
As I said, it's an EPub with garbage. It's not passing the validation. I need to replace the string with a quote, which is what it is supposed to be. The browser is displaying it correctly, but I want it to display a double-quote instead. Epubs have their own rules. I am working on an exploded Epub where the original file got corrupted, and I don't want to fix all the files in an editor - they are almost a gig.	[reply]