STRIP (unprintable characters)

PURPOSE   OPERATION   OPTIONS   COMMAND LINES   RELATED PROGRAMS


Author: Dan Mares, dmares @ maresware . com
Portions Copyright © 1998-2021 by Dan Mares and Mares and Company, LLC
Phone: 678-427-3275
Last updated: 7/10/2013

THIS IS A COMMAND LINE PROGRAM


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PURPOSE

Strips a file of and and all non printing characters.

The non printing characters are considered to be those below hex 0x19 and above hex 0x7F. This logic also removes any carriage return line feed pairs that might show up.

It has excellent use in removing unprintable characters from binary files, such as freespace extracts, or an entire image file.


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OPERATION

Strip will strip a file of all the non-printing characters.

It's default operation is to remove any unprintable characters, and create an output file which contains 80 character lines. These 80 character lines can then be easily read by text editors and possibly interpreted better.

Part of the operation is designed to also remove any embedded CR/LF items. Since these are technically non-printing charactes, they are also removed. However, if a CR/LF is encountered, it is replaced in the output by a period (.). This allows quick viewing to see where there may have been an embedded carriage return. Currently no option exists which will allow for the retention of embedded returns.

The user also has options available which will number the lines, and places a default checkpoint (-cC option) identifer every 10000 characters (of input file), so any text identified can be roughly located within the original binary input file.


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COMMAND LINE

C:>strip -i inputfilename -o outputfilename

C:>strip -i input -o output [options: -b -m -c -C #]


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OPTIONS

The -i input and -o output are required items/option

-i inputfilename:  Required name of the input file to process.
-o outputfilename:  Required name of the output file.
-b:  replace unprintables with blanks, else they are DROPPED COMPLETELY
-m:  if multiple successive periods (.) exist, replace multiples with a single period (.)
-L:  include Line numbers in output
-c:  installs default checkpoint every 10000 characters
-C #  install checkpoint at # characters


RELATED PROGRAMS

There is also a program available which will turn unicode to ascii. but it must be requested seperately, and is not on the website.

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