text format

Jeebizz · 11-08-2005, 10:48 PM

I use pico a lot for editing small texts, but each time I save under pico, it looks fine, until I open it in notepad in windows, the formatting is off, and there are always binary characters, How do I make pico save text formatting and as a pure text file like notepad does?

This is an example of what I did under pico

Code:

email addresses
email1@domain.com
email2@domain.com

but under notepad it would come out like this.. with weird binary characters

Code:

email addresses▐email1@domain.com▐email2@domain.com▐

So how do I get pico to save in a text format suitable for notepad?

urticadioica · 11-08-2005, 10:55 PM

I think the problem is newlines. Windows (and Notepad) save text files with a different line break sequence than Unix has traditionally used. So while Notepad is saving newlines as CR/LF, Pico is probably saving it just as LF. I use vim personally, and there it's trivial to change. I'd imagine Pico has some option to use DOS/Windows style newlines, so you might search for that.

Good luck!

Jeebizz · 11-08-2005, 11:00 PM

Cool, time for 'man pico' then

gbonvehi · 11-08-2005, 11:16 PM

It seems pico doesn't support to save as DOS text files. You could use sed to add the DOS end line characters after editing the file with pico:

Code:

sed -e 's@$@\r@g' -i file

You may want to check if nano supports that, nano is a pico clone with added functionality.

2damncommon · 11-09-2005, 06:56 AM

Wordpad usually will open *nix text files.
There is also programs like unix2dos and dos2unix to convert them.