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Delimiter Hunting

Terminal - Delimiter Hunting
perl -e '$f = join("", <>); for (0..127) {$_ = chr($_); if (/[[:print:]]/) {print if index($f, $_) < 0}} print "\n"'
2012-01-05 23:38:06
User: putnamhill
Functions: perl
0
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Delimiter Hunting

Here's a perl version that only considers printable characters. Change the regex /[[:print:]]/ to look for different sets of delimiter characters.

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Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
for i in `seq 0 9` A B C D E F; do for j in `seq 0 9` A B C D E F; do HEX=\$\'\\x${i}${j}\'; if ! eval grep -qF "$HEX" file; then eval echo $HEX \\x${i}${j}; fi; done; done 2> /dev/null | less
2012-01-05 10:09:07
User: moogmusic
Functions: echo eval grep
0
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Delimiter Hunting

Scan a file and print out a list of ASCII characters that are not used in the file which can then be safely used to delimit fields. Useful when needing to convert CSV files using "," to a single character delimiter. Piping it into less at the end (which could be redundant) stops the command characters being interpreted by the terminal.

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comm -13 <(od -vw1 -tu1 dummy.txt|cut -c9-|sort -u) <(seq 0 127|sort)|perl -pe '$_=chr($_)'|od -c
2012-01-09 01:32:20
User: bazzargh
Functions: comm cut od perl seq sort
Tags: bash
0
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Delimiter Hunting

Search in decimal rather than hex. od dumps the character list, cut to remove offsets, sort -u gives the used characters. seq gives the comparison list, but we need this sorted alphabetically for comm, which does the filtering. I drop to perl to convert back to characters (is there a better way?) and then use od to dump them in a print-safe format.

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