It was actually a rhetorical question. :) col -bx strips nonprintable characters. I have been using this for many years. Especially since the spread of Unico

It was actually a rhetorical question. :) col -bx strips nonprintable characters. I have been using this for many years. Especially since the spread of Unicode. As for _viewing_ nonprintable characters, I am a heavy sed user and honestly I rarely use the l command except occassionally to view newlines, tabs and carriage returns. I prefer od or xxd.