Re: Viewing Control Characters instead of the associated symbol

Mike Williams wrote:

> chrism wrote:
>> Hi all. I seem to be having some trouble viewing a data file that
>> was created in a unix based system. When viewing this file in a unix
>> text editor every character is visible. Specifically, characters that
>> were entered while pressing the control button are displayed with the
>> ctrl symbol in front of the character. While viewing this same file
>> on a windows maching (notepad, wordpad, word, etc...) the characters
>> entered while pressing the ctrl button are displayed with some type
>> of symbol. This symbol changes depending on the type of font selected
>> and ends up being unusable information in that form. Now I have been
>> told by one of our unix gurus that windows is incapable of seperating
>> and displaying the two keystrokes individually.
>
> Rubbish. If Windows couldn't discriminate between a control key and
> another character keystroke then most keyboard applications wouldn't
> work.
>
> The issue is more that the application has saved the data in a form
> where it knows whether it is important to render the two key-strokes
> as independent or a combination. The unix text editor would presumably
> have the same problem opening a Word document or a data file created
> in another application. The issue is similar to opening an ANSI text
> document from another code-page: unless the opening application knows
> which code-page is the source, the results will be partly or totally
> gibberish.
>
> There are a few ways of tackling this:
> 1. see if the unix application can save data to a portable file
> format, rather than one that assumes a particular character encoding.
> Or if that app has a Windows version, then maybe it can render/save
> the file. 2. Use Word and one of its text filters to specify a
> particular character encoding at import time.
> 3. Open in Word and use search-and-replace to convert "control
> characters" to character sequences like "<ctl>a" etc.

I'll bet it is the "End Of Line" issue. *nix editors do EOL differently
than Windows does. Depending on the *nix editor you are using, you can
save your document with the Windows EOL formatting.

Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
.