RE: Remove the ^M Character from a Document

[ZZamboni]

On a similar note, the other day I had a postscript file with an embedded pixmap graphic which contained line breaks represented only as "\r", in addition to the usual DOS "\r\n" at the end of each line. The graphic with the \r's came up, in Unix, as a single over-900K line, which broke most programs I tried to use to manipulate the file (those programs were not written in Perl, clearly :-)

So based on this snippet, I came up with the following one-liner:

perl -pi -e 's/\r\n?/\n/g' <i>file</i>

which solved my problem.

[hacker]

You might want to try a different substitution character, to lessen the obfuscation on this syntax, such as:

perl -pi.orig -e 's#\r\n#\n#g' filespec

or

perl -pi.orig -e 's,\r\n,\n,g' filespec

Though ideally, this is more correct:

perl -pi.orig -e 's,\cM,,g' filespec # commas for clarity

[Abigail-II]

The use of the forward slash to delimited regular expressions and replacements has a history of decades - predating the birth of Perl by years. There are no forward slashes in the regular expression that could cause confusion. So, other than a fear of forward slashes, what makes you think use of a forward slash contributes to obfuscation?

Abigail

[Sifmole]

Perhaps hacker actually means that the use of another character could make things easier to read. I remember somewhere some book or other refering to the "leaning toothpick" problem.