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-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org 
<plug-discuss-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org> on behalf of Michael Havens 
<bmi...@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 
<p...@opscode.com<mailto:p...@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-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org>
 
<plug-discuss-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-discuss-boun...@lists.phxlinux.org>>
 on behalf of Michael Havens <bmi...@gmail.com<mailto:bmi...@gmail.com>>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2013 2:09 PM
To: plug-disc...@phxlinux.org<mailto:plug-disc...@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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