Import in the face of non-printable chars.

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

Bill Campbell propounded (on Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 04:25:20PM -0800):
| On Fri, Jan 11, 2013, Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
| >Jean-Pierre A. Radley propounded (on Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 06:38:27PM -0500):
| >| While importing from a .csv file which was generated from an
| >| Excel spreadsheet, there is a field from which I want to retain
| >| only alphanumeric characters, discarding punctuation like dashes,
| >| parentheses, commas, even spaces.  I have an edit which does this
| >| handily.
| >| 
| >| But I came a cropper today when some input fields contained a high-ascii
| >| character (happend to represent the degree symbol), and my edit gave me
| >| a blank result.  Even when I bypassed the edit and tried to import the
| >| .csv field as-is, the filePro field came up blank.
| >| 
| >| How to eliminate or ignore a character outside the 0-128 range?
| >
| >Ah, I had defined the filePro field as ALLUP.  If I change that to *,
| >then I can import fine with no edit, but that doesn't satisfy the need
| >to delete all but alphanumeric characters. 
| 
| I don't know about Excel offhand, but using "Save As" with the
| OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice spreadsheets allows one to specify the
| character set which defaults to UTF-8.  I change that to the
| appropriate Latin/USASCII setting as the first step.

I was about to use a filter script to ditch the non-alphanumeric
characters when I got your reply.  I use OpenOffice too, and changing
the character set now emits '?' in place of high-ASCII characters.

Thanks.

-- 
JP