remove non-printable characters

[BeanBoy]

I have a character stream I have recieved from a device that contains non printable characters with in it. I want to remove these characters to make parsing easier.

My thoughts were to turn the string into a character array and using a for loop remove all char outside the range of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 [SPACE] [/n] then convert the character array back to a string. This seems resource hungery but I see no other alternative.

[RavensFan]

What about symbols?

I don't consider it resource hungry.  I wouldn't turn it into an array of characters.  I would just work on the string.

But there is probably a way to create a Regex that could do what you want and do a search and replace with it.

[BeanBoy]

I hadn't considered search and replace

[DFGray]

Actually, you original idea was good, it just needs a bit of tweaking.  Converting a string to or from a U8 array in LabVIEW is an in-place operation and will cost you essentially nothing, since the two arrays are actually the same.  Once you have the U8 array, you can use a bucket brigade algorithm to traverse your array.  You can find details of the bucket brigade algorithm here (look at the fourth example).  It is a very useful trick for using a single pass to remove arbitrary data from an array efficiently.  In your case, use the array element to switch a case structure.  This should be faster than a regex search and replace or using the search and replace VI multiple times.

[camerond]

But, you'd better make that last "\n", not "/n". For all the escaped but printable characters (space, tab, NL, etc.) you use a backslash, not a forward slash and make sure you are writing your regex string in "\ code" display or it still won't interpret them correctly.

Cameron

[jd162]

One possible solution (very simple):