[ESS] how to deal with octal character codes in R and/or Emacs (a bit off topic for this list I know)

[Rodney Sparapani]

Mark Kimpel wrote:
> Thanks to all for suggestions. This seems a tricky problem. A colleague
> suggested the below perl script to get rid of all non-ascii characters and
> this worked. I invoked this from a bash shell.
> 
> perl -p -i.bak -e 's/[^[:ascii:]]//g;'
> 
> Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry

Hi Mark:

Well, anything can be tricky if you don't know how to do it.  And, as 
you suspected, this problem is not particularly ESS related (or perl for 
that matter).  However, ESS does deal with a similar problem that you 
might be able to get some ideas from.  Check out the function 
ess-ebcdic-to-ascii-search-and-replace in essa-sas.el

Rodney