Non-Printable Char Stripper Cells

Remove C0/C1 control characters and DEL from cell strings, optionally preserving tab, LF, and CR; other Unicode format characters are left intact.

Description

Control characters can be invisible in imported cells while still affecting display, comparisons or downstream processing.

Control characters can be invisible in imported cells while still affecting display, comparisons or downstream processing. This tool removes the C0 and C1 ranges, including DEL, from already decoded cell strings.^[1]

Remove C0/C1 control characters and DEL from cell strings, optionally preserving tab, LF, and CR; other Unicode format characters are left intact.

When to use Non-Printable Char Stripper Cells

Use this tool to remove C0/C1 control characters and DEL from cell strings, optionally preserving tab, LF, and CR; other Unicode format characters are left intact.

Choose the original CSV text, decoded cell strings, byte values or counts requested by this tool. Use the stated delimiter, encoding, indexing and number/date convention.

How to use Non-Printable Char Stripper Cells and understand its results

Choose the original CSV text, decoded cell strings, byte values or counts requested by this tool. Use the stated delimiter, encoding, indexing and number/date convention.
Enter values, preserveLineBreaks using the field table and calculation rules, then run the tool.
Read values. The explanation below defines the units, signs, ordering and any flags or placeholder values.
If the tool reports an input issue, correct the values and run it again. Apply the stated assumptions when interpreting a successfully returned result.

Input field	Meaning	Value type; see rules below	Requirement
values	Values	list of string; maximum length: 10000; minimum entries: 0; maximum entries: 10000	Required
preserveLineBreaks	Preserve line breaks	boolean	Required

Supply the cell strings and choose whether tabs and line breaks should be preserved. The tool scans each string and removes characters in the stated ranges. When preservation is enabled, tab U+0009, LF U+000A and CR U+000D remain; all other matched controls are removed. The returned list keeps the original order and includes empty strings when a cell becomes empty.

removed ranges = U+0000…U+001F and U+007F…U+009F

Units, indexing, boundary conditions and exceptional cases are defined in the calculation rules above.

Output field	Meaning	Value type
values	Values	list of string

json

{
  "input": {
    "values": [
      "a\u0000b\tc\n",
      "xy"
    ],
    "preserveLineBreaks": true
  },
  "output": {
    "values": [
      "ab\tc\n",
      "xy"
    ]
  }
}

Limitations and assumptions

This does not parse CSV, repair an encoding, normalize whitespace or remove all invisible Unicode characters. A BOM, zero-width joiner and other format characters outside these ranges remain. Removing controls can change meaningful content, so inspect matches first when needed.

Numeric inputs must be finite. Follow the calculation-specific rules for overflow, underflow and exceptional cases. Cell-string lists also have a combined text budget of 100,000 UTF-16 units per list. Missing required fields, extra fields, wrong value types and violations of the calculation rules are input errors.

Alternative or Complementary methods

Use Control Character Finder In Fields: Locate C0 and C1 control characters, including DEL, in cell strings and report cell index, UTF-16 offset, and code point; tabs and line breaks are included. For a complementary task, use Field-With-Linebreaks Flagger: Find zero-based cell indices containing CR or LF characters, treating both individual line endings and CRLF as line-break presence.

References

Non-Printable Char Stripper Cells — tool.io

Similar or alternative tools

Control Character Finder In Fields
Locate C0 and C1 control characters, including DEL, in cell strings and report cell index, UTF-16 offset, and code point; tabs and line breaks are included.
Field-With-Linebreaks Flagger
Find zero-based cell indices containing CR or LF characters, treating both individual line endings and CRLF as line-break presence.