Question

I could not find this answer in the man or info pages, nor with a search here or on Google. I have a file which is, in essence, a text file, but it somehow got screwed up upon saving. (I think there are a few strange bytes at the front of the file accidentally.)

I am able to open the file, and it makes sense, using head or cat, but not using any sort of editor.

In the end, all I wish to do is open the file in emacs, delete the “messy” characters, and save it once cleaned up. The file, however, is huge, so I need something powerful like emacs to be able to open it.

Otherwise, I suppose I can try to create a script to read this in line by line, forcing the script to read it in text format, then write it. But I wanted something quick, since I won’t be doing this over & over.

Thanks!
Mike

Answer 1

You could edit the file using hexl-mode, which lets you edit the file in hexadecimal. That would let you see precisely what those offending characters are, and remove them.

It sounds like you either got a different line ending in the file (eg: carriage returns on a *nix system) or it got saved in an unexpected encoding.