How to remove non-ascii chars using sed

user87005 picture user87005 · Feb 28, 2013 · Viewed 20.8k times · Source

I want to remove non-ascii chars from some file. I have already tried these many regexs.

sed -e 's/[\d00-\d128]//g'  # not working

cat /bin/mkdir | sed -e 's/[\x00-\x7F]//g' >/tmp/aa

but this file contains some non-ascii chars.

[root@asssdsada ~]$ hexdump /tmp/aa |more
          00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 - 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F  0123456789ABCDEF

00000000  45 4C 46 B0 F0 73 38 C0 - C0 BC BC FF FF 61 61 61  ELF..s8......aaa
00000010  A0 A0 50 E5 74 64 50 57 - 50 57 50 57 D4 D4 51 E5  ..P.tdPWPWPW..Q.
00000020  74 64 6C 69 62 36 34 6C - 64 6C 69 6E 75 78 78 38  tdlib64ldlinuxx8
00000030  36 36 34 73 6F 32 47 4E - 55 42 C8 C0 80 70 69 42  664so2GNUB...piB
00000040  44 47 BA E3 92 43 45 D5 - EC 46 E4 DE D8 71 58 B9  DG...CE..F...qX.
00000050  8D F1 EA D3 EF 4B 86 FC - A9 DA 79 ED 63 B5 51 92  .....K....y.c.Q.
00000060  BA 6C FC D1 69 78 30 ED - 74 F1 73 95 CC 85 D2 46  .l..ix0.t.s....F
00000070  A5 B4 6C 67 DA 4A E9 9A - 4B 58 77 A4 37 80 C0 4F  ..lg.J..KXw.7..O
00000080  F3 E9 B2 77 65 97 74 F9 - A2 C0 F2 CC 4A 9C 58 A1  ...we.t.....J.X.

Answer

Thor picture Thor · Feb 28, 2013

This doesn't seem to work with sed. Perhaps tr will do?

tr -d '\200-\377'

Or with the complement:

tr -cd '\000-\177'