On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Adam Morris wrote: > Try \x{8a0} instead. I think that \x normally accepts only two > following characters, so you have to use \x{} for long hexadecimal > numbers. You top posted, so I have to ignore you. Just kidding. I did try that and that didn't work either. Then I did this... perl -pe 's/[[:ascii:]]//g ; s/(.)/$1\n/g' file.txt | sort | uniq -c >| bad_chars.txt ...and when I looked at the resulting bad_chars.txt file in emacs again, the characters looked different. Before they were appearing as purple rectangles, but now they appeared as a pair of characters that looked like this: \302\240 I could represent them exactly that way in perl and delete them. I don't really get what was happening there. Mike > On Mar 5, 2011, at 20:22 , Mike Miller wrote: > >> On Sat, 5 Mar 2011, Jonah wrote: >> >>> Who wants to contribute to a list, when it may spiral off into some >>> off-topic agonizing showboating? >> >> I'd do it. I like it if people stay on topic, but sometimes threads >> spin off into some random direction. It doesn't kill me. >> >> For example, you are writing about your personal feelings about >> religion appearing on a technical Linux list, but I'm changing the >> subject because I noticed a character in a text file that emacs >> described as follows: >> >> 2208, #o4240, #x8a0 >> >> I'm trying to figure out how to use perl to remove such characters from >> a text file. It seems like it would be easy using something like >> s/\x8a0//, but that isn't it. Anyone know? >> >> Mike