stripping out ASCII chars using regexp?

From: Greg (djbitchpimp_at_snowboard.com)
Date: 03/18/04 

Date: 17 Mar 2004 15:23:48 -0800

I am trying to get rid of the ASCII chars from the end of a string
that I download from a webpage using LWP::Simple. The script downloads
the HTML from a webpage and then uses HTML::TableExtract to extract
the information from specific tables on the page.

This basically gives me a string like this:

���,Temper Tantrum�,Take Care Comb Your
Hair�,,,CD�,23.56��,�,0 Days
Ago�,Scotla�

which I then split into an array using:

my @line = split (',', $line) ;

I then do a comparison on $line [6]:

if ($line [6] >= 75) {

... do something

When I run this using -w, I get the following error:

Argument "15.99M- M- " isn't numeric in numeric ge (>=) at
./parse_wants.pl line 49.

This is because somehow some extended ASCII chars got in the end of
the string. If I do:

my @chars = split ('', $line [6]) ;
foreach $char (@chars) {
    print "$char ";
    print ord ($char) ;
    print "\n" ;
}

It gives me

1 49
5 53
. 46
9 57
9 57
� 160
� 160

I have tried stripping off these trailing ASCII 160 chars a number of
ways:

s/\240//g
s/[\200-\377]//g
tr/\177-\377//d
s/\&#65533//g

but the only way I could get rid of them was using:

chop $line [6]
chop $line [6]
 
Can anyone figure out a way to get rid of these trailing ASCII
characters using a regular expression?

Thanks

Greg

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