From: pharrington <xenogenesis@...>
Date: 2009-08-15T00:50:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Unprintable characters

On Aug 14, 9:46 am, Stuart Clarke <stuart.clarke1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Rather difficult problem I have I think.
>
> I am processing large amounts of data and at the end of processing I
> wish to remove all unprintable characters from the resulting file.
>
> At the moment I have to load the file up into a good text application
> and run a find and replace find the following phrase
>
> find: [^[:print:]]
> replace:
>
> I then select regular expression of the find and replace and it goes off
> and looks for all unprintable characters and replaced them with nothing.
>
> Ideally I would like to do this in Ruby, something like
>
> data.gsub([^[:print:]], "")
>
> Obviously it is far more complex that this and I am looking for input.
>
> Thanks in advance
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

is it?

this seems to work without problem for me:

data = File.read("some/crazy/mp3")
data.gsub(/[^[:print:]]/, "")

Ruby 1.9 needs force_encoding("binary"), but basically the same deal.

I assume I'm missing something obvious :\