special character

tostay2003 · 01-05-2009, 05:09 PM

Hi,

I am trying to unload file from a database. Which contains few lines with the character below. Rest of the data was unloaded appropriately.

Code:

a) What does this below character means?
b) How can i remove it,
I already have

Code:

sed '/^$/d'

c) Will this effect the file by any means (If I am guessing properly, this is the eof notation)

Thanks for help

chrism01 · 01-05-2009, 05:13 PM

I'd start by analyzing the record in the DB to find out what it is. Never assume...
Which DB are you using? If MySQL, see this page and use the ASCII() fn: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...functions.html

tostay2003 · 01-05-2009, 05:48 PM

its universe database & those characters actually shouldn't be there in the unload file. But for some reason (one method) of unloading the file fetches these characters, the other method via application doesn't fetch this character

raconteur · 01-05-2009, 07:01 PM

The character you posted (0x0C) is a form-feed character (page break). Just a wild guess, but it may be that the method that produces these characters is attempting to format the output.

tostay2003 · 01-06-2009, 02:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raconteur

The character you posted (0x0C) is a form-feed character (page break). Just a wild guess, but it may be that the method that produces these characters is attempting to format the output.

Yes, true, that method tries to format the output. Thanks for the info.

With command

Code:

od -c

I got the below result

Code:

0000000  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n  \f  \n
0000020  \f  \n  \f  \n
0000024

I have tried two statements, but they didnt work.
a) The below code isn't removing it, or may be leaving out the newline characters

Code:

tr -d "\f"

b) The below sed statement is deleting the complete data

Code:

sed 's[ \t]*\f[ \t]*//g' | sed '/^$/d'

raconteur · 01-06-2009, 12:39 PM

Try escaping the FF character with single quotes in the tr command, i.e.

Code:

cat infile | tr -d '\f' > outfile