for perl wizards.

[Matthew Seaman]

Gary Kline wrote:
> 	Whenever I save a wordpeocessoe file [OOo, say] into a
> 	text file, I get a slew of hex codes to indicate the char to be
> 	used.  I'm looking for a perl one-liner or script to translate
> 	hex back into ', ", -- [that's a dash), and so forth.  Why does
> 	this fail to trans the hex code to an apostrophe?
> 
> 	perl -pi.bak -e 's/\xe2\x80\x99/'/g'  
> 
> 	If there any another other tools, I'm interested!
> 

That's a problem with shell quoting rather than perl.  You're using '
as the delimiter on your command line, so you need to escape any instances
within commands.  Or you can replace a literal ' with the ASCII character
code \x27.

However, in the more general sense what you are doing is replacing certain
UTF-8 character codes with similar characters from the ASCII range.  That
sounds to me like a job for iconv(1) -- in ports as converters/libiconv

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW

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