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January 20, 2010
Reveal Hidden characters in Ubuntu
Kind of an interesting aside here. I was trying to import a test bibliography into Drupal's biblio module and it was not registering the publication type of the first entry. The problem, it turns out, was a hidden character at the very front of the input file.
Here's a snippet of the entry:
%0 Journal Article
%A Barnese, L. E.
%A Lowe, R. L.
%A Hunter, R. D.
%D 1990
%T Comparative grazing efficiency of pulmonate and prosobranch snails
%J Journal of the North American Benthological Society
%V 9
%N 1
%P 35-44
It turns out Windows programs, such as Endnote, which I used to create the original input file, are known to introduce hidden characters which are known as an UTF-8 BOM. Who knew?
The string of characters I was seeing was:
\357\273\277
I used the following command to reveal the hidden characters:
$ od -c /home/data/Documents/Bibliography/umbs_format_test_1-20-10.txt
Here are the first two lines:
0000000 357 273 277 % 0 J o u r n a l A r 0000020 t i c l e \r \n % A B a r n e s
Posted by kkwaiser at January 20, 2010 01:57 PM