Regex to convert non-printable to printable char

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

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Re: Regex to convert non-printable to printable char by CountZero (Bishop) on Aug 18, 2012 at 06:49 UTC
Replacing all these unprintable characters by the same printable character (in this case a full stop): use the substitution operator `$string=~s/[\x00-\x1F]+/./g` [download] Note the `g` at the end: it means it will do the replacement many times, i.e. for all the unprintable characters in `$string` Added `s`. Thanks to AnomalousMonk keen eyes. CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James My blog: Imperial Deltronics	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Regex to convert non-printable to printable char by tobyink (Canon) on Aug 18, 2012 at 06:52 UTC
You know `\x09` is tab, `\x0A` is line feed, and `\x0D` is carriage return. You probably don't want to replace those. `perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Regex to convert non-printable to printable char by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on Aug 18, 2012 at 15:09 UTC
This seems to be just what the `tr` operator is for. Bill	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Regex to convert non-printable to printable char by Anonymous Monk on Aug 18, 2012 at 06:29 UTC
XML::Entities	[reply]
Re: Regex to convert non-printable to printable char by GlitchMr (Sexton) on Aug 22, 2012 at 10:04 UTC
Just a note, `\x7F` is also unprintable character, In one of my scripts, I use following translation to filter non-printable characters. `tr[\0-\x1F\x7F] [\x{2400}-\x{241F}\x{2421}]` [download] `\x{2420}` is space, in case you have noticed a gap in range. If you don't want to replace them with Unicode non-printable graphics characters, you could replace `\x{2400}-\x{241F}\x{2421}` with `?` or `\x{FFFD}` (Unicode replacement character). Also, in most cases you wouldn't want to match `\x09` (tab), `\x0A` (line feed) or `\x0D` (carriage return). You could use this translation when you don't want to match them. `tr[\0-\x08\x0B\x0C\x0E-\x1F\x7F] [\x{2400}-\x{2408}\x{240B}\x{240C}\x{240E}-\x{241F}\x{2421}]` [download] It also doesn't work on EBCDIC, if you want to match EBCDIC, most likely you will need different range of characters (`\x00-\x3F\xFF`).	[reply] [d/l] [select]