String and escape characters

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polilop - 15 Dec 2006 12:26 GMT

I have a very long string in which i need to remove new lines (\\r\\n)
etc.Managed to remove new lines but in my output i still get '', which kind
of escape character is this?Is it EOF? how to remove it?Thanks

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Andreas Leitgeb - 15 Dec 2006 13:09 GMT

> I have a very long string in which i need to remove new lines (\\r\\n)
> etc.Managed to remove new lines but in my output i still get '^L',
> which kind of escape character is this?Is it EOF? how to remove it?Thanks

It's a "eop" (end of page / formfeed) character, that (back in the
old days(*) of plaintext printers) triggered the printer to skip to next
page, and was the reason why accidentally printing a binary file caused
so many sheets of paper to be wasted.

In newsgroups, this character is generally used to hide spoilers:
some usenet-clients hide the text after that char until some
key is pressed. I just saw that happen for your posting. (I now
replaced it with it's ^-char notation, to prevent my answer to
be also hidden.)

The hexcode of that char is 0x0C, and it's backslash-combo
is \f (for: formfeed), so to embed it into a regexp-string
you could use "...\f..." or "...\u000C..."

(*): these days aren't all that old: for PCL printers, this
character still has its meaning.

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polilop - 15 Dec 2006 15:18 GMT

Didn't look at the message after i posted it, good you figured it out. thx
alot

>> I have a very long string in which i need to remove new lines (\\r\\n)
>> etc.Managed to remove new lines but in my output i still get '^L',
[quoted text clipped - 17 lines]
> (*): these days aren't all that old: for PCL printers, this
> character still has its meaning.

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String and escape characters

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