Hunting gremlins

Posted by Bob_Mesibov on Jan 23, 2020 4:14 AM EDT
BASHing data; By Bob Mesibov 		Mail this story
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In the UTF-8 files I audit, the only invisible characters I expect to see... er... not see... are whitespace, horizontal tab and linefeed. All others I call "gremlins". They include carriage return, no-break space, soft hyphen and another 62 control characters. Gremlins are a nuisance. One gremlin causes a shell to hang. Less evil gremlins lurk inside apparently OK strings and cause the strings to be processed weirdly. This post explains a new script that locates and visualises gremlins in tab-separated tables.

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