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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Syntax Questions › removing non-printing characters
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removing non-printing characters? (Read 191 times)
pogopogo
removing non-printing characters?
Mar 3rd, 2009, 6:04pm  
I'm trying to read a two-column file that will be plotted as a series of points, but there seem to be some hidden characters stuck in there. I'm using trim to strip whitespace and splitTokens to separate the columns, but when I print the resulting array to the text area, the numbers come up like this: ?42. What do the question marks represent and how do I get rid of them?
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PhiLho 
Re: removing non-printing characters?
Reply #1 - Mar 3rd, 2009, 9:41pm  
They might be control chars (?) or Unicode chars not present in the font used to display the string.
Actually, they are not control chars, they are displayed as squares.
You can use a regular expression to get rid of them:
Code:
String toClean = "ab\bcd\fe\uA600fg\u1604hi\u3636jkl";
println(toClean);
String cleaned = toClean.replaceAll("[\u0100-\uFFFF]+", "");
println(cleaned);
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pogopogo
Re: removing non-printing characters?
Reply #2 - Mar 5th, 2009, 8:39pm  
Thanks for the tip, makes sense.
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« Last Edit: Mar 5th, 2009, 9:59pm by pogopogo »  
 
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