how to remove undesired characters(ascii) first column in the file

[jimmymj]

how to remove undesired characters(ascii) only first column in huge the file? would you please tell what is wrong my testing command.

EXAMPLE FILE
201208|123456|US|CA
§201208|23457|US|CA
o201208|258741|US|TX
Â201208|123458|US|TX
¢201208|2851452|CA|TN

EXPECT FILE OUTPUT

201208|123456|US|CA
201208|23457|US|CA
201208|258741|US|TX
201208|123458|US|TX
201208|2851452|CA|TN


I did as follows. does not work;

tr -cd '\11\12\40-\176' < testfile.txt> resultfile.txt

or

perl -ane '{ if(m/[[:^ascii:]]/) { print } }'>resultfile.txt

[tpl]

welcome to the forum

don't know what those weird characters are, but using "od -c" to find their octal codes, and using 'tr" as you did--this seems to
work on your sample

tr -d "\302\247\303\202\302\242\o" <example_file

[atreyu]

how to remove undesired characters(ascii) only first column in huge the file? would you please tell what is wrong my testing command.

Hello and welcome!

As well as perl and tr, you could use sed, too, e.g.:

cat input.txt|sed -e 's|^[^0-9]||' > output.txt

that sed expression says "any line in which the first character is NOT a digit will have that character deleted". not elegant, but does the job.

[jimmymj]

welcome to the forum

don't know what those weird characters are, but using "od -c" to find their octal codes, and using 'tr" as you did--this seems to
work on your sample

tr -d "\302\247\303\202\302\242\o" <example_file

Also there is t201208 in the first colume I also remove t away
First colume has only 0-9 others removed away.
I don't know why I have wired char and t in flat file extracted database.
Would you help me
Thanks

[atreyu]

Also there is t201208 in the first colume I also remove t away
First colume has only 0-9 others removed away.

that sed command i posted should work on a "t", too, as long as it is the first character in the line and is not a 0 thru 9.

I don't know why I have wired char and t in flat file extracted database.

How are you generating your database dump?

[jimmymj]

thank you!

[jimmymj]

Thank you for your answer.

[mactruck]

Did that work? I think awk would have been easier..... never mind I saw the post wrong.