While it *can* be done in sed, the solution requires visiting every character and manually noting a transliteration, as well as doing those changes for every input encoding that you can You should have the `iconv` package on your system which will let you specify the input/output encodings as well as force those characters to be transliterated: iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT input.txt > output.txt which converts from (-f) UTF-8 encoding to transliterated ASCII. If your input is some other Windows code-page or other source, you can change the "from" encoding to something other than "utf8" such as "cp1252". -tim On April 17, 2017, Jeffery Mewtamer wrote: > Things like left and right double curly quotes and single right > curly quotes are the most common offenders, which also screws up my > screen reader's pronunciation of contractions and possessive, > though things like ellipsis, em-dashes, and accented letters also > cause problems. > > Most of these problems can be fixed manually, though it means I > often spend as much time correcting the file as I do reading it. > > I know how to use sed to do global search and replace on plain text > files, at least where both the string to be found and the string > it's to be replaced with can be typed, but most of the replacements > I'd like to make have search strings containing characters not on my > keyboard. > > So, how do I tell sed to replace a left double curly quote with a > straight double quote, an ellipsis with three periods, or an e with > an acute accent with a normal e among other such things? And if > this is beyond sed's capabilities, could someone suggest another > command line tool that can automate this task? > > -- > Sincerely, > > Jeffery Wright > Bachelor of Computer Science > President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa. > Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the > Albemarle. > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list