Those Nasty Awful Windows Characters!

[IJ Reilly]

I recently tried pasting some text from an e-mail into a document. The text (originating from Windows) contained invisible text characters that screwed up the formatting in my document. I tried my usual technique of passing the text through TextEdit and converting it to plain text, but the nasty Windows characters remained embedded. They show up as blank spaces, but the blanks actually contain a high-byte character that must be significant in Windows somehow, but makes a mess on a Mac.

Does anyone know of any simple method of washing all high-byte characters out of Windows text?

Thanks!

 

[belvdr]

Not sure how to remove a high-byte character (or what it is), but here's what I'd do to see what it is. Paste the text into vi or another plain text editor. Then use octal dump to see what it is:

od -c <text file> | more