Question

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How do I get rid of invalid characters in a plain-text file when using Gedit?

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1046 / 2 Years ago, fri, october 28, 2022, 1:06:20

Problem

Gedit says that one of my files using UTF-8 encoding has invalid characters, and may get corrupted if I continue to use it.

Details

The file in questions is my Someday/Maybe List. I usually add to it links to sources I'd like to read, such as blog posts. I suspect that the link of one of the sources I added contained invalid characters, causing my issue.

I found here that I need to run isutf8, then use xxd or hexdump to scan a file for invalid characters. Running isutf8 is pointless because if this page is correct, all it does is tell you whether a file has invalid characters or not. I've read some manpages on xxd, and other sources on hexdump, but I don't understand any of it.

What I've tried

Not much. I fear I might break the file or something if I edit it, so I left it untouched. Besides, my research skills are poor, so I couldn't find a solution to this myself.

Answers

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answered 2 Years ago ingwhin · Accepted Answer

This could in principle not happen if you exclusively use Gedit to edit the file. Characters in that case would be automatically converted to the character code of the current text file.

If for one reason incorrectly encoded characters would be introduced, then one way to find out where they are would be to use

grep -axv '.*' file.txt

(credit goes here). That command will only show lines containing invalid characters. To facilitate identification of the line, you can add the -n option to display the line number.

Then open the file in Gedit, continuing past the warning message that is given. You then can edit out the wrong characters. Save and close, then reopen the file. If no warning is issued anymore, all wrong characters have been removed.