detox: Cleanup crew

Oddball screenshot today, from an extra extra extra machine that found its way to my house a couple of weeks ago:

Special for you, just to show off detox, because special character sets show up as plain squares on my framebuffer machine.

You’ll have to look close to see what detox actually does, but if you have sharp eyes, you’ll find it.

Special characters or international glyphs are converted to base character sets, according to rules or “sequences.”

You can designate a sequence and get specific results, in either base characters (such as française to francaise) or combinations thereof (I think æ becomes ae, for example).

As you can see above, the results are more impressive with French than with Japanese, but that’s only to be expected; I didn’t anticipate detox would wrangle with more than 50,000 characters across three alphabets. 😯

I mentioned this a few years ago, in the context that it was easier to manage files at the command line if they had been stripped of unusual characters.

I have noticed some issues with music players too, which couldn’t read the file names if they included certain extended characters. (Ahem. Audacious.) And that was only about six months ago.

So there are modern applications for this, even if most modern machines can probably display those characters just fine.