replacing non-breaking spaces in a text file

Note

• foo.txt represents the input file containing at least one non-breaking space.
• bar.txt represents the output file not containing any non-breaking spaces.

Isolate the suspected non-breaking space in foo.txt, then use cat foo.txt | perl -C7 -ne 'for(split(//)){print sprintf("U+%04X", ord)." ".$_."\n"}' to view the Unicode code points for all letters in the file. Look for U+00A0, the Unicode code point of the non-breaking space. Because the UTF-8 equivalent is C2 A0, use sed 's/\xC2\xA0/ /g' foo.txt > bar.txt to replace all non-breaking spaces with ordinary spaces.

licensing

Some rights reserved: CC BY-SA 3.0. Includes significant content from a question and answer on Super User by Karel Bílek, with changes made.

prior work

• The method of replacing all non-breaking spaces with ordinary spaces was introduced to me by an answer on Super User by Thor.
• The method of viewing the Unicode code points for all letters in a file was introduced to me by an answer on Super User by Karel Bílek.
• The Unicode and UTF-8 code points were introduced to me by Non-breaking space§Encodings on Wikipedia.