displaying control characters/regex help

[Peter]

Hi - I'd like to know if Emacs has the ability to display control
(non-printing) characters (as in Word, where it is possible to hit a
button and see representations of all the non-printing characters).  I
may not actually need it for the problem I'm working on, but it would
be nice to know - what I'm actually trying to accomplish is a global
search-and-replace...I'm looking to replace:

Any amount of whitespace (spaces, tabs, carriage returns), followed by
either one or two digits, followed by any amount of whitespace,
followed by a fixed string, followed by (possibly) more
whitespace. There would be regular text (word characters) on either
side of this regex region. (I'm trying to clean up a document that was
saved-as-text from Acroread, that had a page number and a fixed footer
on each page).

Sample:

-----boundary-----

34


My string is quite stringy.


-----boundary-----

I want to replace the entire mess between the boundaries with just a
carriage return.

Can I get a push in the right direction, please?

Thanks much -