Trying to delete non-ASCII characters only [duplicate]

Question

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• Remove non-ASCII characters from CSV 11 answers

I am trying to manipulate a text file and remove non-ASCII characters from the text. I don't want to remove the line. I only want to remove the offending characters. I am trying to get the following expression to work:

sed '/[\x80-\xFF]/d'

Answer 1

The suggested solutions may fail with specific version of sed, e.g. GNU sed 4.2.1.

Using tr:

tr -cd '[:print:]' < yourfile.txt

This will remove any characters not in [\x20-\x7e].

If you want to keep e.g. line feeds, just add \n:

tr -cd '[:print:]\n' < yourfile.txt

If you really want to keep all ASCII characters (even the control codes):

tr -cd '[:print:][:cntrl:]' < yourfile.txt

This will remove any characters not in [\x00-\x7f].