Microsoft to the rescue

So, I had another blog entry I was working on yesterday, but I ran into some problems and realized that the problems are actually more interesting than the entry (although actually they aren't that interesting either, which possibly doesn't say much about the original entry).

I keep entries I'm working on in a plain old RTF file that I either work on with Abiword or TextEdit depending on whether or not I'm on my desktop or Powerbook. The one file has all the entries in it, all jumbled together and terribly disorganized in various states of editing. It's the source of the next week or so worth of entries, at least, and represents a middling amount of work.

A problem I have from time to time with TextEdit is that, trying to paste a URL in to it, if it's an RTF file rather than plain text, it actually inserts the hyperlink instead of the text. For this purpose, I need the URL text, because I'm just going to paste it into s here and have to turn it into a hyperlink at this point anyway. So, while I'm working on the original entry, I paste a URL in, and it puts in the link. It's not a huge deal but it interrupts workflow and train of thought as I have to go in and change the document to plain text and re-paste the URL. Somehow in this process, I switched from RTF to plain text and told it to save the file to the original document, which is RTF. It objected but I over-rode it, being in a hurry.

My mistake. Something happened to render the file all but invisible. Using TextEdit, I could see it as plain text, but any attempt to copy and paste out of it was unsuccessful--nothing would paste! I couldn't resave the file in any other format, all came up blank. Abiword could open it but showed no text. Some text editors refused to open it entirely, others would pull it up, but again, show just a blank page.

Finally, I open it in vi and I see what's happened. Somehow, a control character of some sort has been inserted between every single letter in the document, and this is giving both the editors and the copy/paste function fits.

Now, there is probably a way to search and replace control characters in vi, but it wasn't obvious in any of the examples I Googled. None of the other hyper-functional, snazzy, open-source text editors that I have laying around in my distribution would even recognize the text, let alone allow me to manipulate it (all you emacs people can stuff it, I didn't even try that bloated monstrosity).

In my desperation, I fired up a VMWare session of Windows XP and gave it a shot with the humble included Windows Notepad software. And you know what? The sucker worked. Opened the file right up, exposed the control characters, and did a comprehensive two-step search and replace to restore the file to full working order.