Re: Suggestion for tr / transliteration binutil

[Pádraig Brady]

smu johnson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I hope this is the right place to ask this.  I think a very handy argument
> to add to the list of aliases for character classes in tr would be a new one
> that behaves like [:cntrl:], except that it will not include newline
> characters in that class.
> 
> The reason is at work here I deal with XML data that people send us that has
> all sorts of strange characters in it, like ^@, ^Z, etc etc... and I'd like
> to use tr to quickly trip all this garbage out of there without it
> destroying the newline characters too...

This is not supported at present, but you may be able to get what you want with:
tr -c '[:print:]\n' .

Your suggestion has some merit though.
I've previously needed to do something similar:
http://code.google.com/p/fslint/source/browse/trunk/fslint-gui#122

Pádraig.