I got a zip file from the government but it won't unzip properly

[Paul Mooring]

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 at lists.phxlinux.org <plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org> on behalf of Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com>
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 <paul at opscode.com<mailto:paul at opscode.com>> wrote:
There's some null characters (look like ^@ in vim) in this file causing your problem, run `file -I <file_name>` 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<http://www.opscode.com>

________________________________
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org> <plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org>> on behalf of Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com<mailto:bmike1 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 2:09 PM
To: plug-discuss at phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss at 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~(-:

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