Re: [Help-bash] Reading and handling "control" characters from a file

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 01:56:46 +0200
Davide Brini <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Apr 2012 01:48:49 +0200, Davide Brini <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> 
> > > > Shouldn't the single quote trick work here? eg
> > > > 
> > > > $ a=$(printf '\x4\n')
> > > > $ printf "%d\n" "'$a"
> > > > 4
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Yes, I thought that was the solution for a brief time, but it
> > > still fails when the character is a newline, for some odd
> > > reason.  Bash seems to be rather fickle when it comes to certain
> > > things, allowing this, objecting to that.
> > 
> > You must be doing something odd, because newline works for me:
> > 
> > $ a=$'\n'
> > $ printf "%d\n" "'$a"
> > 10
> > $ printf -v byte "%d" \'"$a"
> > $ echo "$byte"
> > 10
> > 
> > Check how you're handling whatever you think should contain the
> > newline before converting it.
> 
> Maybe I see, you're using "read" to get the values. In that case, use
> the -d '' option to read so bash will only stop at NULs and newlines
> will be read just like any other character.

Eureka!  That's it!  It works!  How did I overlook that?

Thank you so much!  End of the mystery!

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier
address@hidden