Viewing Control Characters instead of the associated symbol

[Guest]

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. I am hoping this
is wrong and that is is possible. If anyone has any knowledge on this and
would care to share it I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

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. I am hoping this
is wrong and that is is possible. If anyone has any knowledge on this and
would care to share it I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

I use VEDIT or PS Pad text editors. These offer a "hex" view of the file.

 

[Mike Williams]

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.

 

[Malke]

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