How to strip edit characters

[Larry Wall]

In article <2856 at idunno.Princeton.EDU> pfalstad at phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Paul John Falstad) writes:
: In article <6665 at aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> ejmag at aplcen (Magnusson Eric 859-4680) writes:
: >Is there a "shell" way to remove the backspace characters, yet retain
: 
: sed /.^H/s///g

Won't work.  Think what happens on "abc^H^H^H".

I wasn't going to post a sed solution because it looked to be messy, but
it would need to be something like

    sed ':top
	/.^H/{
	s///
	b top
    }'

or, a little more efficiently, if there are multiple ^H fields,

    sed ':top
	/[^^H]^H/{
	s///g
	b top
    }'

You ought to be able to use

    sed ':top
	s/[^^H]^H//g
	t top'

but t is buggy some locales.

Larry