Thread: INI files content

Hello

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the ini files used by Trados have got each ASCII character padded with an null byte:

pabloa:~/Development$ hexdump -C file.ini
00000000 ff fe 0d 00 0a 00 5b 00 47 00 65 00 6e 00 65 00 |......[.G.e.n.e.|
00000010 72 00 61 00 6c 00 53 00 47 00 4d 00 4c 00 53 00 |r.a.l.S.G.M.L.S.|
00000020 65 00 74 00 74 00 69 00 6e 00 67 00 73 00 5d 00 |e.t.t.i.n.g.s.].|
00000030 0d 00 0a 00 43 00 61 00 73 00 65 00 53 00 65 00 |....C.a.s.e.S.e.|
00000040 6e 00 73 00 69 00 74 00 69 00 76 00 65 00 3d 00 |n.s.i.t.i.v.e.=.|
00000050 59 00 65 00 73 00 0d 00 0a 00 44 00 54 00 44 00 |Y.e.s.....D.T.D.|
[etc ...]

This makes it very difficult to manipulate with standard unix tools. For the time being I've managed to find out how to filter it so I can use "grep" on substrings I might be interested on. First I created a very simple sed script:
pabloa:~/Development$ cat -A cleanup_ini.sed
s/^@//g

Here ^@ is the null character. Then I can do things like:

pabloa:~/Development$ sed -f cleanup_ini.sed file.ini | grep Group
Tag1=type:External,Group
Tag2=native_title_lang:External,Group
Tag12=type_of_place:External,Group
Tag50=ddc:External,Group

With lots of good luck someone might find this useful.

Cheers.
P.