Yeah, in general editors or other tools will put in place-holders for non printable characters. The ^M's are carriage returns (left by Windows) and can be safely ignored, what I saw was a null character good text editors shouldn't choke up on either of those but the null characters would explain the encoding strangeness. You can look for non-printable characters using greps character range: grep -aP '[\x7f-\xff]' AZ021306-FOIArefund-list.txt If you're interested in fixing this to be recognized as a text file, you can combined that with `nl`: nl AZ021306-FOIArefund-list.txt | grep -aP '[\x7f-\xff]' which should get you a line number. From there use a "programmer's text editor" (vim, emacs, sublime text, ect.) to removing the offending character. Hope that helps. Paul Mooring Operations Engineer www.opscode.com ________________________________ From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org on behalf of Michael Havens Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 3:02 PM To: Main PLUG discussion list Subject: Re: I got a zip file from the government but it won't unzip properly cool..... vi opens it. I do not see any '^@' characters but I see a lot of '^M' characters. I see a few '@' characters. So I do not need to worry about those characters.... only the non ascii ones? :-)~MIKE~(-: On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Paul Mooring > wrote: There's some null characters (look like ^@ in vim) in this file causing your problem, run `file -I ` and you'll see it's charset is binary. I found some null chars on line 155 (grep for non-ascii characters to find them). You can remove them with sed or tr and be on your happy way. Paul Mooring Operations Engineer www.opscode.com ________________________________ From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org > on behalf of Michael Havens > Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 2:09 PM To: plug-discuss@phxlinux.org Subject: I got a zip file from the government but it won't unzip properly It seems to unzip fine but the document that opens freezes libre writer and when I try to open it with a text editor it complains about encoding. here is the file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5x24uzhyrv3mo1/az-foiarefund-list.zip Any ideas how to open it? :-)~MIKE~(-: --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss