Thanks to everyone who responded. I used Allen K's advice:
good-chars: charset [#" " - #"/" #"0" - #"9" #"A" - #"Z" #"a" - #"z"]
file: to-file ask "Filename? "
data: read/binary file
forall data [
if find good-chars first data [
write/append %good.txt to-string copy/part data 1
]
]
This worked fine. The file was an Access database (Jet Engine) which got
corrupted when someone opened it in MS Word and overwrote it. Originally,
it was thought someone put a password on it. Of course, the ASCII version
looks like a mess, but the names, phone numbers, etc. are readable. Of
course, these people didn't have a recent copy or backup of the file.
Mark Evans suggested using Icon - which looks good; Michael Jelinek
mentioned using "strings" if I had Unix (I'm using Win95; I do have the MKS
toolkit, but not currently installed); Bob Paddock sent me a little program
(strip.exe) to clean the file. Of course, Euphoria or Snobol4 would
probably work well, too.
Rebol seems the simplest - nice for a little job like this.
Pete Geddes
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Peter H. Geddes; Savannah, Georgia USA
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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